In fact the base nuclear fuels are almost extraordinarily safer than the products of their use, speaking from a nuclear perspective alone. Nuclear fuel that is

In fact the base nuclear fuels are almost extraordinarily safer than the products of their use, speaking from a nuclear perspective alone. Nuclear fuel that is stable enough to be useful as a reactor fuel has such a long half-life (usually on the order of billions of years) that it's only very weakly radioactive. But the fission products formed from the fission of the fuel are much much more radioactive.