My uninitiated mind would think that it would be the other way around.
I was watching a video about nuclear power. The guy being interviewed was wearing safety glasses and nitrile gloves while holding a uranium fuel pellet. Then the camera pans to a screen showing the robot handling spent fuel in the bottom of a 40-foot deep pool of heavy water. The pool is in a room behind a big red door with every “do not enter” warning imaginable. I would think the fuel would be less radioactive coming out than going in.
In: Chemistry
So, to ELI5
In order for a nuclear reactor to pull power out of it’s fuel. The very atom the fuel is made from breaks down. Not the _chemical bonds_ between atomes (like splitting The 2 Hs from H²O) but the actual atom itself splitting. So the Uranium is no longer uranium. And other elements can have totally different levels of radiation.
[ HERE ](https://www.env.go.jp/en/chemi/rhm/basic-info/1st/02-02-03.html) is a link to the process. In a fairly easy to understand way.
(I’m simplifying a bit here) But ‘spent’ uranium fuel isn’t even uranium anymore.
It’s also worth noting that there are different kinds of radioactive. Some are more useful than other.
(I’m not an expert on nuclear reactors, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that _none_ of them are particularly useful in a uranium reactor. It’s free neutrons and massive deficits that produce the actual energy to heat the water and drive the turbines)
To ELI5 this part. You start your reaction with [Uranium + Neutron] that has _X_ mass. You end the reaction with all your [bi-products + 2 neutrons] which has a mass < _X_.
Then you can **E=mc²** on that missing bit of mass, and *that* is where the energy to heat the water came from.
Latest Answers