Often people say that the radioactive material we use in nuclear plants just comes from the ground so we can just put the waste back in the ground and there's no change. This isn't fully true since nuclear plants produce radioisotopes that weren't in the original material we mined (that also wouldn't be produced if we just left the ore in the ground)... But how close is it it to true?
Say you have a nuclear plant that runs for 50 years before being decommissioned, if you put all the waste generated in the plant over its lifetime in one place and measured the sV at a specified distance, how much more would this be than if you just put all the ore that had been mined for this plant in one place and measured the sV at the same distance? How would this vary over time, i.e. would the waste from the plant decay faster/slower? How would the distribution of types of radiation vary? Does it depend largely on the type of plant? Is there anything else important that would change?