The fuel going into a reactor has a tiny amount of radioactivity. The technicians handling fresh fuel bundles don't need lead lined protective gear, just some gloves and clean room procedures to keep the technician's greasy grubby paws off the highly refined and expensive fuel bundles.
That technician probably works with nuclear fuel every day and he's exposed to far less occupational radioactivity than a flight attendant because at higher altitudes there's less atmosphere to attenuate cosmic radiation. Even orders of magnitude more concentrated doesn't lead to some extreme amount of radiation. If it hasn't gone critical then the radiation hazard is negligible outside your body. In fact, if you were to finely grind up some Uranium and chemically process it into some biologically absorbable form and ingest a lethal amount the heavy metal poisoning would be lethal before the radioactivity.
>Also yes many of the byproducts are more radioactive than the fuel.
That's the understatement of the year. The fission products are extremely radioactive and are responsible for the massive amounts of shielding and care needed around high level nuclear waste.
>The stuff in the dirt tends to be comparatively stable - the unstable stuff decayed long ago.
Also not true, the stuff in the dirt has been constantly decaying and building up to a steady state decay chain in proportion to the half life of each isotope and the production rate of it. Fresh fuel is basically entirely Uranium with almost no decay products whereas all the radon that seeps up in basements all comes from radioactive decay of unstable isotopes underground. "The stuff in the dirt" is responsible for around 21,000 lung cancer deaths every year in the United States.
https://nrcpublicblog.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/fuelrods.j...
That technician probably works with nuclear fuel every day and he's exposed to far less occupational radioactivity than a flight attendant because at higher altitudes there's less atmosphere to attenuate cosmic radiation. Even orders of magnitude more concentrated doesn't lead to some extreme amount of radiation. If it hasn't gone critical then the radiation hazard is negligible outside your body. In fact, if you were to finely grind up some Uranium and chemically process it into some biologically absorbable form and ingest a lethal amount the heavy metal poisoning would be lethal before the radioactivity.
>Also yes many of the byproducts are more radioactive than the fuel.
That's the understatement of the year. The fission products are extremely radioactive and are responsible for the massive amounts of shielding and care needed around high level nuclear waste.
>The stuff in the dirt tends to be comparatively stable - the unstable stuff decayed long ago.
Also not true, the stuff in the dirt has been constantly decaying and building up to a steady state decay chain in proportion to the half life of each isotope and the production rate of it. Fresh fuel is basically entirely Uranium with almost no decay products whereas all the radon that seeps up in basements all comes from radioactive decay of unstable isotopes underground. "The stuff in the dirt" is responsible for around 21,000 lung cancer deaths every year in the United States.