It's fully apparent you are not at all acquainted with what happened at Chernobyl and the doses the workers received.
There absolutely no chance that a fuel assembly from a properly shut down reactor is more radioactive than the core of a reactor that ran away to the point of ejecting it's core.
It blew off the 2 million pound upper biological shield and ejected much of the core and burning hot fuel through the roof of the building and onto the roofs of surrounding buildings.
Each piece of fuel the guys pictured are picking up with shovels is radiating 20,000 roentgens per hour and only the guys who spent hours up there actually died and nobody was incapacitated until hours later.
20 years later, the smoking hole that used to be the core is still emitting over 10,000 roentgens.
A couple of guys (sitnikov and pravik) were on top of the roof near the stack looking down into the reactor.
That's about as high a dose as anybody who has ever lived received.
They lived at least a week if not two.
(note removed the images n the quote for sake of not reposting them and cluttering the board)
I seriously doubt every chunk of the fuel was radiating at that level. The size of the source plays a large role in the radiation levels.. smaller chunk, smaller dose... (if the material is of the same composition, and stage of half-life)...
A tiny piece of Co-60 would be a whole lot less dangerous/damaging than a 5 pound chunk.. I dont doubt one bit that in the pit levels were nearly 20k/hr, but on the roof, while still extremely high, and lethal, they wouldn't compare to what was happening inside the core itself.
As was previously posted, there have been several criticality excursions in the US and abroad, which have given doses lower than the 20k range, and yet those people were incapacitated in minutes, and many dead within hours...
To cite an example of what distance can do to reduce radiation, look to Louis Slotin's incident with the "Demon Core" during the manhattan project. He was doign something pretty dumb really, and created a burst of supercriticality, which exposed him to over 1000 rads, killed him 9 days later (this @ only 1k rads), however, there were other scientists in the room, only tens of feet away, who recieved less than a lethal dose from the same incident. Proximity plays a HUGE role...
Quote from an article about the slotin incident below:
On May 21, 1946, physicist Louis Slotin and seven other Los Alamos personnel were in a Los Alamos laboratory conducting an experiment to verify the exact point at which a subcritical mass (core) of fissile material could be made critical by the positioning of neutron reflectors. The test was known as "tickling the dragon's tail" for its extreme risk. It required the operator to place two half-spheres of beryllium (a neutron reflector) around the core to be tested and manually lower the top reflector over the core via a thumb hole on the top. As the reflectors were manually moved closer and farther away from each other, scintillation counters measured the relative activity from the core. Allowing them to close completely could result in the instantaneous formation of a critical mass and a lethal power excursion. Under Slotin's unapproved protocol, the only thing preventing this was the blade of a standard flathead screwdriver, manipulated by the scientist's other hand. Slotin, who was given to bravado, became the local expert, performing the test almost a dozen separate times, often in his trademark bluejeans and cowboy boots, in front of a roomful of observers. Enrico Fermi reportedly told Slotin and others they would be "dead within a year" if they continued performing it.
While lowering the top reflector, Slotin's screwdriver slipped outward a fraction of an inch, allowing the top reflector to fall into place around the core. Instantly there was a flash of blue light and a wave of heat across Slotin's skin; the core had become supercritical, releasing a massive burst of neutron radiation. He quickly knocked the two halves apart, stopping the chain reaction and presumably saving the lives of the other men in the laboratory, though it is now known that the heating of the core and shells stopped the criticality within milliseconds of its initiation. Slotin's body's positioning over the apparatus also shielded the others from much of the neutron radiation. He received a lethal dose of 1000 rads neutron/114 rads gamma in under a second and died nine days later from acute radiation poisoning. The nearest person to Slotin, Alvin C. Graves, was watching over Slotin's shoulder and was thus partially shielded by him, received a high but non-lethal radiation dose of 166 neutron/26 gamma rads. Graves was hospitalized for several weeks with severe radiation poisoning, developed chronic neurological and vision problems as a result of the exposure, and died 20 years later of a heart attack probably caused by complications from radiation exposure.Besides Graves, there were 6 others in the room, who recieved doses that caused long term problems (cancers etc) but had no acute phase...
Distance+shielding+time... makes all the difference...
