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
I think the main misunderstanding that OP has that the other posts miss is that the radioactivity is not what fuels a nuclear reactor and isn’t what is “spent” in the reactor. What is fueling it is energy left over from the mass of the fuel when splitting it. It’s just that the material that is easy to split in a reactor is also radioactive. And the byproducts generally even more radioactive.
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