Well who would have guessed it? Well to be fair, I don’t think I would have guessed it, at least not quite in this way … because according to a report in yesterday’s Guardian, coal-fired power stations are more injurious to health than nuclear ones.

In what’s described as a “natural experiment”, researchers followed the switch from nuclear to coal following the 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear accident, where they could compare power generation by nuclear (before) and coal (after) in the same area. They found particulate pollution increased by 27% and average birth weight fell. And that’s without any effect of the particulates on things like asthma.