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If you got all of your electricity for your lifetime solely from nuclear power, your share of the waste would fit in a single soda can. If you got all your electricity from coal, your share would come to 146 tons: 69 tons of solid waste that would fit into six rail cars and 77 tons of carbon dioxide that would contribute to accelerated global warming.

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The infrastructure that supports the Internet, online commerce and nearly all corporate data services is engaged in a vast migration eastward in search of energy prices cheaper than anything available in Silicon Valley, where the digital revolution began, according to a report released Tuesday by the environmental group Greenpeace.

Internet companies often cloak themselves in an image of environmental awareness. But some companies that essentially live on the Internet are moving facilities to North Carolina, Virginia, northeastern Illinois and other regions whose main sources of energy are coal and nuclear power, the report said. The report singles out Apple as one of the leaders of the charge to coal-fired energy.

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“They are very brand-conscious companies,” Mr. Cook said. “They want to be presenting themselves as responsible and innovative.” He added that the companies “don’t want people to be concerned about, when they post their videos, that that’s somehow attached to coal.”

In fact, coal accounts for about half the generation capacity of the electric utility that powers an enormous data center in Maiden, N.C., that Apple recently opened, and some industry analysts think the center will be expanded. Nuclear power accounts for the large majority of the rest of that capacity, according to figures supplied by the utility, Duke Energy.

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Kristin Huguet, a spokeswoman for Apple, added that the company is building two large projects intended to offset energy use from the grid in North Carolina: an array of solar panels and a set of fuel cells.

Also from Greenpeace:

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The new coal-fired plants are inexpensive, and it is possible to obtain the coal. The problem is that to operate one with 1000-megawatts would require 90-100 tons every day. Over 350,000 tons of ash would be produced and over 4 million tons of carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides and sulfuric oxides would be released to the environment.

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Over the past few decades, however, a series of studies has called these stereotypes into question. Among the surprising conclusions: the waste produced by coal plants is actually more radioactive than that generated by their nuclear counterparts. In fact, the fly ash emitted by a power plant—a by-product from burning coal for electricity—carries into the surrounding environment 100 times more radiation than a nuclear power plant producing the same amount of energy.

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China will be using the coal ash from her coal-fired power stations to provide the uranium necessary for her nuclear power stations.

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In the U.S., about 50 percent of electric power is generated by burning coal. A typical large coal-fired power plant generates more-or-less 1000 megawatts of electric power. SONGS generates about twice as much.

One coal-fired plant burns about 4,000,000 tons of coal every year.

Each plant will need a coal train of more than 100 hopper cars with four to six locomotives towing them and spewing diesel exhaust every day.

One coal-fired plant produces about 300,000 to 500,000 tons of coal ash every year. That’s a pile of toxic contaminating residue that would fill a container the size of a football field to a height of about 200 feet every year.

That one coal-fired plant each year emits around 2 to 5 tons of uranium, 5 to 12 tons of thorium and 14 million tons of carbon dioxide into the environment and atmosphere.

That coal-fired plant also emits mercury, radioactive potassium-40, radon, lead, and other toxins in very significant quantities, continually.

The radiation released into the environment by a coal-fired plant is about 100 times greater than what’s released by a nuclear plant.

In the U.S. alone, it is acknowledged that 10,000 to 30,000 (depending on whose statistics you believe) untimely deaths are caused every year as a result of pollution caused by coal-fired plants.

And, of course, coal, as is oil and natural gas, is an exhaustible resource, and we will eventually use it up.