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> Even the fuel rods of current reactors are safe to touch before they are spent

What? Fuel rods consist of uranium, which alpha-decays into thorium (a sheet of paper is enough to shield the alpha particles), but the next decay step is beta-decay to thorium, and that needs more shielding. No way one can touch a fuel rod without getting a load of radiation.

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The half life of U-235 is hundreds of millions of years, and U-238 even longer. So it's not decaying fast enough to be dangerous.

Yeah, maybe there's some other model, but there would be no reason for a Spent Fuel Pool [1] if you could handle the things.

There's also an interesting anecdote about spent fuel here [2]. You can get pretty close, if it's under water... but it gets very dangerous very fast.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spent_fuel_pool [2] https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/

Spent fuel is dangerous to handle. That's why I specifically mentioned the unspent fuel.

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