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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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.
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