Carbon contains radioactive isotopes and if you use a lot of it to generate electricity you end up with a lot of it in a single spot. It’s specifically carbon-14 you measure when using radiocarbon dating to estimate how old an item is.
… approximately 2,000 coal samples from the Western United States … concentrations of uranium fall in the range from slightly below 1 to 4 parts per million (ppm). … Coals with more than 20 ppm uranium are rare in the United States. Thorium concentrations in coal fall within a similar 1–4 ppm range, … Coals with more than 20 ppm thorium are extremely rare.
concentrations of coals in China are estimated based on uranium analyses of 1535 coal samples … Late Jurassic and Early Cretaceous (J3–K1), and Eogene and Neogene (E–N) coals are 2.91, 5.43, 3.67, 1.18, 1.84, and 3.92 μg/g, respectively. The overall average weighted uranium concentration of coals in China is 2.31 μg/g.
I’m curious about the radiation risk from a coal power plant, are radioactive carbon isotopes generated in the coal firing process?
Here’s an article - coal naturally contains trace amounts of radioactive elements and burning a bunch of it concentrates them.
Carbon contains radioactive isotopes and if you use a lot of it to generate electricity you end up with a lot of it in a single spot. It’s specifically carbon-14 you measure when using radiocarbon dating to estimate how old an item is.
https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/1997/fs163-97/FS-163-97.html
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0360544206001113
AFAIK that’s 1.18-5.43 ppm.
Obviously, when you burn that, it gets concentrated.