Spent fuel shearing machines in nuclear power plants are important equipment for the head end of spent fuel reprocessing in power reactors. Condition monitoring and fault diagnosis play important roles in ensuring the safe operation of spent fuel shearing machines, avoiding serious accidents, and reducing their maintenance time and cost. Existing research on fault diagnosis of spent fuel shearing machines has some shortcomings: (a) the current research on fault diagnosis of shearing machines is small and diagnostic accuracy is not high. The research methodology of shearing machines needs to be updated; (b) the high difficulty in obtaining fault data and the often limited and highly informative fault data for shearing machines lead to low diagnostic performance. To solve these problems, this study constructs a residual network (ResNet) model based on Bayesian optimization (BO) and convolutional block attention module (CBAM). First, dual-channel difference method is introduced into the preprocessing of noise signals, and two data enhancements were applied to the Mel spectrograms used as inputs to the model. Second, the attention mechanism CBAM is introduced to improve the ResNet to enhance the deep feature extraction ability of the network, and the BO algorithm is used to train the hyperparameters, such as the optimizer, and retrain the network model after obtaining the optimal hyperparameters. Finally, the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed model are verified through experiments on the noise signals of spent fuel shearing machines. The experimental results show that the diagnostic accuracy of the constructed model is 93.67%, which is a significant improvement over the other methods.