What would happen if I touched uranium?

 If you hold a chunk of bare uranium, your hand won't burn and nothing will glow. The real danger isn't the radiation—it's what happens if you forget to wash your hands afterward.

A solid biscuit of uranium metal. Unprocessed elemental uranium is a dense, silvery-gray heavy metal, not a glowing green rock. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Despite its reputation as a deadly nuclear material, natural uranium is safe to hold. Its safety profile comes down to its long half-life. Uranium-238, the most common isotope, takes 4.5 billion years for half of a given sample to decay. Because the decay process is so slow, the metal emits very little radiation at any given moment.

The radiation uranium does emit consists almost entirely of alpha particles. Alpha particles are relatively massive and carry a strong electrical charge, making them highly ionizing but poor at penetrating matter. They are easily stopped by a sheet of paper or a few inches of air. Most importantly, alpha particles cannot breach the dead outer layer of human skin (the epidermis). As long as the uranium remains outside your body, the radiation cannot reach your living cells, and your external exposure is practically zero.

The actual threat of touching uranium has everything to do with chemistry. Uranium is a toxic heavy metal, similar in its physiological effects to lead or mercury.

If you handle a piece of raw uranium and then touch your mouth or eat a meal without washing your hands, you risk transferring microscopic uranium dust into your digestive system. Once inside your body, the risk profile changes. With no protective layer of dead skin to block them, the alpha particles are free to bombard living internal tissues. More immediately, the chemical toxicity of the heavy metal targets the renal system, where it can cause kidney damage.

The standard protocol after handling depleted or natural uranium metal is simply to wash your hands thoroughly with soap and water to remove any heavy metal residue.

Which state is the largest producer of uranium in India?

The state of Andhra Pradesh is the largest producer of uranium in India. Tummalapalle village located in the Kadapa district of Andhra Pradesh is considered as one of the largest uranium reserves in the world. The continuous expedition in Tummalapalle in Kadapa and Koppunuru in Guntur led to the discovery of more uranium making this state the largest producer of uranium in India.

These reserves were officially commissioned in 2012 as they were equipped in catering to 25 percent of the requirement of uranium in the nuclear power plants in India. In 2000, when these mines were first found, they had about 14,300 tonnes of uranium oxide which rose to 85,000 tonnes in 2014. The total reserves of uranium oxide in the divided Andhra Pradesh reached about 1,22,000 tonnes in 2017. As per the official data, the Tummalapalle region in Kadapa district has rich resources amounting to 1,19,930 tonnes of uranium oxide in which 1,01,701 tonnes was of uranium metal. The Koppunuru region of the Guntur district contained 2,761 tonnes of uranium oxide in which 2,341 tonnes was of uranium metal.

The uranium ore reserves are found 1,000 meters deep in the mines. Just beside the Tummalapalle mine, a processing plant has been set up which converts the uranium ore into sodium diuranate for the use in nuclear power plants. According to the reports, the western part of the Palnadu region located on the right hand side of the River Krishna and the Paddagattu-Lambapur area on the left hand side have rich resources of uranium.

The Uranium Corporation of India Limited (UCIL) has constructed a mine in the Tummalapalle region which extends up to 7.6 km and has the efficiency of mining almost 3,000 tonnes of uranium ore on daily basis.