> Incidentally this is about the same amount of coal we burn per year.
Who are "we"?
The US alone consumed about 545 million short ton of coal in 2021 [1]. From what I can tell, that's in the range of 400 million m^3. Did I get the numbers wrong? (I just semi-randomly picked a converter online as I have no reference point to how heavy a cubic meter of coal is). Because that does not seem at all like about the same amount.
That's the whole point about my criticism. Uranium is incredibly dense so phrasing it in terms of volume of the uranium is just misleading.
Regarding the calculation https://www.worldometers.info/coal/ says we are burning 1,147,083 cubic feet of coal which is about 30000 cubic meters which is about the same as a football field up to 10 yards (~50mx90mx10m).
> The world consumes 1,147,083 cubic feet of coal per capita every year (based on the 2016 world population of 7,464,022,049 people) or 3,143 cubic feet per capita per day.
(My emphasis).
So closer to a football field per person according to this. That sounds excessive to me, so I'm not sure I trust those numbers.
This [1] says "1 ton of coal is approximately 40 cubic feet per ton, might be a little less, might be a little more....". Using my earlier numbers from DOE, that gives 545 million short tons * 40 = ca. 21,800 million cubic feet, or ~ 600 million m^3, or ca. 1.67m^3 per capita in the US. That sounds low, but as a global average, maybe not.
You're right that the worldometer number is excessive and not to be trusted.
They properly calculated 1.147083 tons of coal per capita per year, but then incorrectly multiplied by it 1,000,000 cubic feet per ton.
The actual conversion factor for coal seems to be 20-60 cubic feet per ton, depending on whether you use bulk density or particle density. Their per capita calculation is too high by a factor of about 15,000-50,000.
You're right that the amount of coal consumed is not similar to the amount of uranium byproduct generated. The original commenter's intuition was misled, not by uranium's density, but by its energy density. Of course there is an xkcd for this.
https://xkcd.com/1162/
Who are "we"?
The US alone consumed about 545 million short ton of coal in 2021 [1]. From what I can tell, that's in the range of 400 million m^3. Did I get the numbers wrong? (I just semi-randomly picked a converter online as I have no reference point to how heavy a cubic meter of coal is). Because that does not seem at all like about the same amount.
[1] https://www.eia.gov/coal/annual/