Talk:Uranium Ore/@comment-2.222.45.218-20120919232502

Some of the comments here are a bit silly regarding dangers of Uranium...

When you dig Uranium out of the ground, the Uranium itself is not very radioactive. Very, very long half-life which is the same as saying it's not very active. You can refine it and/or enrich it, and none of this will change. When you take the reactor (or bomb) 'critical,' there is a self-sustaining reaction in which the Uranium atoms split ('fission') into smaller but much more radioactive atoms. A nuclear reactor with fresh fuel is the safest it will ever be; the longer the reactor is run, the more fission products build up and the more radioactive everything will be. You also get some Plutonium in there too but that's another story.

There is one other note though: when you first dig Uranium out of the ground, it has been sat there for hundreds of thousands of years, slowly decaying. There are some 'decay products' sat in the rock around it. Some of these decay products leak out, like Argon gas, but others just sit near the Uranium.

So if you want to be realistic, the Uranium ore should be slightly damaging when you first find it, then it should be harmless when you do something to it (which strips out everything else and leaves just the Uranium). Then it would remain harmless throughout any refining and enriching process until it is put into a reactor or blown up. At that point it should be damaging because of the high radioactivity of the fission products.