Lead is used to block some kinds of ~~radiation~~ irradiated. Does the lead itself ever become ~~radioactive~~ irradiated?
Edit: I meant irradiated not radioactive
In: Chemistry
No. Irradiated and radio active are not the same. Radio active means the mass is letting off high energy light or particles from the atoms inside falling apart. This is called nuclear decay and is what makes power plants and bombs work. Irradiated means the mass was hit by these particles. When these particles hit they can do many different things like ripping off an electron, being absorbed into the nucleus, bouncing off, or passing through. This can damage the material but will not make lead radio active.
The idea that radiation turns materials radioactive is, for the most part, false. Of all the commonly encountered types of radiation (electromagnetic including gamma, alpha, beta, neutron), only neutron radiation is capable of making other things radioactive.
Any material exposed to the other kinds will never develop its own radioactivity, however if radioactive dust sticks to the material then this dust will of course continue to be radioactive and make your shielding radioactive until it is cleaned.
For neutron radiation specifically, some cursory research indicates that lead exposed to neutron radiation does become somewhat radioactive, although it would take a lot of neutrons to make it super radioactive. It appears that it would radiate mostly beta radiation once made radioactive, although possibly some gamma as well.
No. When something is hit with radiation it doesnt become radioactive. For something to be radioactive, the atom itself needs to be unstable and this isn’t anything to do with it being hit with radioactive particles or waves.
P.s: you should probably change this from chemistry to physics
No using radiation in your question was correct. Radiation is basically just moving particles, gamma radiation is an electromagnetic wave (photon), beta radiation is the emission of a charged particle like an electron or positron (similar to an electron but with positive charge) and alpha radiation is basically the core of an helium atom (2 protons and 2 neutrons being ejected at once).
So a radioactive material emits radiation on it’s own, for example because it “decays”, collapses into smaller atoms/cores by emitting energetic particles. Whereas irradiation is the process of exposing a material to radiation. For example you could use an ion beam kind of like a knife in order to carve material into a different from. Though it’s more of a scalpel than a broadsword.
So irradiation is the exposure to radiation, so if you use it as shielding it will inevitably become irradiated, that’s the point. But your question was whether lead itself becomes radioactive in the process.
And for that you’d need to look into what happens to the lead upon irradiation. Is the material absorbed and incorporated, in a way that it changes the state of the lead atom (more specifically the core) and is it going to decay from there again or is it just reflected. And if it changes the state and decays over time, what is the half-life of that reaction so is that a matter of seconds or years.
The difference being that shorter half-lifes lead to high radiation (emission of particles) in a shorter amount of time, but it’s also over faster, while long half-lifes will be radioactive for a long time but usually emit very few particles because of that.
So you’d need to look up what kind of irradiation you’re having and how that effects the lead. Those are information that are usually to be found in tables so you can just look it up.
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