You could have clicked the link above and read it yourself (for example here). It's about a study from 1978 with data often much older from plants in Tenessee and Alabama (known for their magnicicient regulations, especially at that time *cough*)
To quote from that article:
"The result: estimated radiation doses ingested by people living near the coal plants were equal to or higher than doses for people living around the nuclear facilities."
"Dana Christensen, associate lab director for energy and engineering at ORNL, says that health risks from radiation in coal by-products are low. "Other risks like being hit by lightning," he adds, "are three or four times greater than radiation-induced health effects from coal plants."
"According to USGS calculations, buying a house in a stack shadow—in this case within 0.6 mile [one kilometer] of a coal plant—increases the annual amount of radiation you're exposed to by a maximum of 5 percent. But that's still less than the radiation encountered in normal yearly exposure to X-rays."
You will not find any mention of nuclear waste in there because the actual only number they used in that study is radiation living next to running nuclear power plant... as a base line to compare against.
EDIT: As for the increasing levels of radiation. The UN has a lot to say about that:
"The main man-made contribution to the exposure of the world's population has come from the testing of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, from 1945 to 1980. Each nuclear test resulted
in unrestrained release into the environment of substantial quantities of radioactive materials, which were widely dispersed in the atmosphere and deposited everywhere on
the Earth’s surface"
Yes... here we can actually talk about nuclear waste. It's still less harmful then nuclear testing was.
