Ummm... you don’t want to hold uranium in your hands.
There are stories out there about a few of the nuclear accidents. One happened, I believe, at a Navy reactor. The techs had been trained over and over about how quickly they could remove the control rods. Well, something happened. So a tech went in and I guess removed a control rod too fast - and the reactor went critical, there was an explosion.
It was shut down, and after alot of cleanup and suiting up they went in. He was gone. They looked everywhere.
Finally somebody noticed him pinned to the ceiling dead, pinned to the ceiling by a control rod.
Go out to Wiki and read some of the stuff that happened at Chernobyl. It’ll scare the socks off of ya!
But regardless, reactor tech has vastly, vastly improved in the last 3 decades or so. So much so that I would feel safe having one in my house to generate power, but that’s not an option.
That was at Twin Falls, Idaho.
You can hold a fuel pellet or fuel rod in your hands, btw. As long as they have not been used. That is, gone critical. After that — no way. Tan tan boo hah.
That is the SL-1 story, a full scale meltdown in the US that few know about.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SL-1
I hope no one ever made another reactor that could go prompt critical by removal of a single rod, not to mention one that didn’t have a physical stop to prevent removing it that far.
I'm not the greatest fan of Chernobyl's RBMK design, but to be fair a lot of the reason for the disaster was human error. To start with, the operators purposely disabled all safety systems, running the reactor completely under manual control (the system as designed probably would have safely shut it down in time). They also had poor training in the reactor's design, so some things they did just made matters worse.