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
Thing about refined uranium for reactors is that it’s actually pretty stable for a radioactive element. Half life is something like 700million years.
It’s why it’s able found in ore in decent quantities instead of already having decayed long ago. The decay can also be induced in a chain reaction by gathering enough of it near each other so that neutrons from one decay are likely to hit other atoms and cuse them to decay. This allows a reactor to controllably accelerate the decay and generate the amount of heat we want by adjusting the uranium concentration, total volume, and absorbing or reflecting neutrons.
Nuclear waste though has a much shorter half life. It decays much faster and produces more radiation in the short term. And while we have a way to accelerate decay, we do not have a way to decelerate them.
Latest Answers