Iranian authorities are reporting no signs of off-site radiation or contamination in the wake of U.S. attacks on three of the country’s nuclear sites. […] That’s according to a statement put out by the International Atomic Energy Agency on Sunday. Rafael Mariano Grossi, the agency’s Director General, said that “as of this time, we don’t expect that there will be any health consequences for people or the environment outside the targeted sites.”
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Enrichment means that they bring in some material with some amount of radioactivity, and they separate it into portions with more radioactivity and less radioactivity. At any given time materials with all three levels of radioactivity would be there, and could be released by a bombing.
*Three levels is a gross simplification, of course.
Uranium 235 isn’t very radioactive in the absence of a neutron flux. It’s fissile which means it will undergo a reaction when it absorbs a neutron and its fission products are radioactive but the biggest risk from handling uranium (below a critical mass) is its chemical toxicity rather than radioactivity (and that applies just as much to the non-fissile U238)
I wouldn’t care about radiation. I’d care about aresolized uranium hexafluoride though. A toxic acidic reactive heavy metal gas? Delicious. It’s more dangerous than weapons grade uranium by a mile.
It won’t spread very far due to its density though. I wouldn’t like to be in the enrichment room itself if the bombing did rupture some active centrafuges but outside should be fine.