Eli5: How and why is uranium bad / deadly for the human body?
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The uranium itself is not *that* radioactive, at least not the naturally occurring uranium (it has to be processed to be viable as nuclear fuel or weapons, the process is called *enrichment* because it enriches the proportion of radioactive isotope in your mix, with *isotope* being the version of atom you have, all uranium atoms have the same number of protons, but they can have different numbers of neutrons, and depending on how many neutrons they have, they are either stable or not, and non-stable isotopes split into smaller atoms, this is called radioactive decay). Anyway, your body does a lot of chemical reactions, and to those reactions an atom of Uranium actually looks a lot like some other atoms (I think it would be a lot like calcium but don’t quote me on that), so your body *could* accidentally use an atom of Uranium in chemical reaction, where it doesn’t belong, and it *could* work but down the line the product would not have chemical properties it should have. This is how most of heavy metal poisoning work on chemical level, when exposed directly to cells. But human body (and animal bodies in general) have evolved complex systems to filter out heavy metals from bloodstream, so most of uranium never reaches *most* of your cells, instead your kidneys filter it out of your bloodstream… Which means that for a time all of that uranium is concentrated in your kidneys, it gets into kidney cells and there it ends up in chemical reactions where it has no business being in.
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