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
The spent fuel rods contain some fission products that are very radioactive, like Iodine-131 and Barium-140. These have short half-lives, so they decay to other, less radioactive isotopes. That’s why the spent fuel rods are kept in water, to cool them and shield the radiation. After a while, the radiation decreases as the more radioactive isotopes decay away.
Some of those isotopes are particularly dangerous. Strontium-90 mimics calcium, the body absorbs it into the bones. So you’ve now got a radioactive substance in your bones.
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