And it doesn't release more radiation than a bomb. Pu-238 is an alpha emitter--and alpha emitters can only hurt you if they get inside your body (or from simple heat--pick up one of those rods and you'll get burnt just like if you picked up any other hot piece of metal.) The decay product is U-234, also an alpha emitter and with a quarter of a million year half life.
Likewise, it's Pu-239 contaminant is an alpha emitter and decays to U-235, likewise an alpha emitter, this time with a half life of three quarters of a billion years.
You also don't understand about half lives--you get one decay per atom. If one isotope has a half life a thousand times as long as another you get one thousandth as many decays per second and thus one thousandth the radioactivity per unit of time.
A bomb converts material with a long half life into material with short half lives and thus greatly increases the amount of radioactivity.