I’m watching Chernobyl on HBO and they’re describing the different areas of the building after the explosion, some of which they say would kill you within days or weeks due to the high level of radiation. They also talk about how they can’t even use robots to clean the material up because the extreme radiation will shred the circuitry of the robots. So, how on earth are these things constructed in the first place?
In: Engineering
fuel rods are only really dangerous after the fuel is spent / irradiated by use in a reactor. You can handle new fuel rods by hand with only minimal protection. They only have 3-20% of U235 in them (which mostly decays by low-penetrating alpha particle relase, unlike high energy, high penetration gamma radiation relase in a fission reaction). Spent fuel is full of fission byproduct isotopes that are usually high energy, short halflife – thus there is a LOT of radiation emission.
Chernobyl’s reactor 4 core was full of a) partially used fuel, b) its internal construction was already exposed to fission neutrons / gamma radiation from the process. So the graphite moderator, steel construction, etc was highly radioactive as well, c) primary loop cooling water was obviously radioactive (and so was the steam going up into the air)
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