eli5 How can non-radioactive elements and materials become radioactive?

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I understand how uranium is radioactive because it essentially tears itself apart but what I don’t understand is how like plastic and metal tools used to handle it becomes radioactive.

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Long story short, the plastic and metal material itself is not becoming radioactive.

What does happen is parts of the *actual* radioactive material can rub off, brush off, scrape off, etc. and cling to the plastic or metal. This is generally called *contamination*. So now you’ve got a metal tool that also has some radioactive material on it spewing out radiation. In some cases it is possible to clean that tool or material off (decontaminate).

Anonymous 0 Comments

The radioactivity detected from tools used to handle radioactive materials is just from trace amounts of the material being transferred to it so it’s still uranium atoms that are decaying, they’ve just been transferred to the tool in question

Anonymous 0 Comments

If you bombard a material with the products of radioactive decay, like neutrons, some of those neutrons might collide with the atoms in the material making them transform into a unstable version of of element which may then undergo radioactive decay. Or little bits of radioactive dust might settle into the material and cause it to become contaminated with radioactivity that way.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Metals generate dust. That dust gets everywhere. Especially when you’re machining it. That dust is radioactive, in the case of uranium. It can also physically absorb into the surface if there’s a lot of heat and close contact, such as machining.

Radiation *can* make other things radioactive, but not usually the radiation from uranium.

Anonymous 0 Comments

For the most part it is just contamination with radioactive particles. The tool used to remove the fuel rods will pick up some surface contamination. If its Uranium that’s not too bad because it decays slow, if its contaminated with some of the fission products it’ll be a lot more radioactive for a bit

That said, metals in the reactor itself can become radioactive. Both fission and fusion produce high speed neutrons which can strike an atom and join with it, this is called [Neutron activation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_activation). Basically all iron that you can find is stable, but if you start smacking it with neutrons then some of that 5% that is Fe-54 becomes Fe-55 which is radioactive with a 2 year half life so you will have taken non-radioactive steel and made radioactive steel

For it to matter you need to be hitting it with a lot of neutrons to create a lot of Fe-55 so a steel liner of a reactor may have issues after decades but an iron hammer that gets near a fission reactor won’t have any notable changes

Anonymous 0 Comments

First of all you have to understand what is radiation: it’s the transmission of energy in waves or particles through a medium. There are different type of radiation but the subject of the post is electromagnetic radiation (Light, Microwave, Gamma radiation, …) and particle radiation (Alpha radiation, Beta radiation, Neutron radiation, …).

Uranium is a naturally unstable element because its nucleus has reached the limit size with all its neutrons and protons that is naturally possible through the natural forces. Thus it starts to lose pieces as it can’t keep everything together until it becomes stable. Uranium in the specific goes through Alpha Decay which means uranium starts shooting alpha radiation (which are cluster of 2 protons + 2 neutrons) until the nucleus can again keep itself stable.

An object is said that it became radioactive because: a) radioactive dust stuck on it and it’s too difficult to remove it, it’s a very hard to remove thin dust; b) induced radioactivity.

Induced Radioactivity is manly induced by Neutron Radiation which is a really energetic neutron flying freely. Atomic nucleus can capture these free neutrons and becoming heavier and heavier and reaching the limit where they become unstable. These nuclei don’t need to reach the size of uranium, they are smaller and just slight increase of the nuclei is enough to become unstable. At this point they starts shooting back what they can’t keep, it can be Alpha Decay, Gamma Decay and more.

Anonymous 0 Comments

This can happen in a few different ways:

One way is through a process called nuclear decay. This is when an unstable nucleus, or the center of an atom, breaks apart and releases energy in the form of radiation. This can happen naturally over time, or it can be caused by things like exposure to other types of radiation or high temperatures.

Another way is through nuclear reactions. This is when two or more atoms combine or split apart to form new atoms, which can give off radiation. This can happen in a nuclear power plant, where atoms are split apart to create energy, or in a nuclear bomb, where atoms are combined to create a powerful explosion.