If we really want to split some hairs, some waste products don’t even need to be radioactive to be weaponized. Depleted uranium ammunition makes for excellent armor penetrating rounds and comes (primarily) from the enrichment process of uranium for use in reactors.
I thought about mentioning that too, it muddies the waters a bit because it is still technically radioactive and so there are some concerns about health effects from that (although it is not very radioactive, to the point that it can actually actually used as radiation shielding in some applications)
But it kind of goes down a bit of an absurdist rabbit hole from there. Because we humans are really good at weaponizing pretty much literally anything if we put our minds to it. Even if we were able to somehow able to tune our nuclear processes so that at the end all of the fuel and byproducts would be converted into nothing but a pure, clean, non-radioactive mixture of nitrogen, oxygen, and traces of other gasses just like our atmosphere, we could then use that in a compressed air cannon or something.
If we really want to split some hairs, some waste products don’t even need to be radioactive to be weaponized. Depleted uranium ammunition makes for excellent armor penetrating rounds and comes (primarily) from the enrichment process of uranium for use in reactors.
I thought about mentioning that too, it muddies the waters a bit because it is still technically radioactive and so there are some concerns about health effects from that (although it is not very radioactive, to the point that it can actually actually used as radiation shielding in some applications)
But it kind of goes down a bit of an absurdist rabbit hole from there. Because we humans are really good at weaponizing pretty much literally anything if we put our minds to it. Even if we were able to somehow able to tune our nuclear processes so that at the end all of the fuel and byproducts would be converted into nothing but a pure, clean, non-radioactive mixture of nitrogen, oxygen, and traces of other gasses just like our atmosphere, we could then use that in a compressed air cannon or something.