From my understanding, nuclear fallout happens when dust or debris becomes irradiated. But does this include the air molecules even with the absence of dust?
And lastly, if you had some, say sand that was contaminated by fallout, how does the radiation emitted work? Would it be similar to heat? In the sense the closer you are to the sand you would feel more heat? I get really confused with why it’s just dust and debris, and how far they can emit radiation.
Thank you kindly in advance 🙂
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It’s just like an incandescent lamp!
The closer you are the brighter (more radioactive) the area because more radioactive particles are hitting you.
As for your question about the air; it can happen, it’s called ionization and is what lightning is. It’s the charged particles glowing, however in radioactive ranges they’re even more energetic and can actually hurt you! They hurt you by acting like little bullets that rip your DNA to bits and then your body has to put all the pieces back together again but it isn’t perfect.
So like a light, the closer you are to the light the more light that hits you and the brighter you are, the closer to a radioactive thing the more particles being emitted by it are hitting you.
So when we have an area that is irradiated, the dust and other material is more important because they actually get lodged inside you and continue to emit radiation. That’s why you need a filtering mask for radioactive areas – so you don’t get radioactive dust in your lungs.
If you need some visualization here imagine it like you draw a circle then draw two lines going in almost the same direction. They’ll start close but drift farther and farther. Now imagine that this is happening in a specter with radioactive particles. The farther from the source the farther apart the emitted particles are, because of the angle they left at. Now this is happening hundreds of times a second in random directions. That means if you’re farther from a radioactive item there’s a lower chance you’ll be in the line of fire than if you’re close to it.
The fallout is radioactive particles. The particles are unstable isotopes used in weapons and nuclear reactors that spontaneously break down and emit radiation.
The radiation is not heat or perceived, but is instead high-speed subatomic particles. The subatomic particles are called ionizing radiation because they can rip apart the molecules of your cells and DNA, causing mutations and cancer.
Especially dangerous is dusts that can be ingested. Then the radioactive material is in your body for a very long time, causing continued lifetime damage.
Extreme exposure can give radiation burns, not heat, but the cells of your body being destroyed.
Its the residual radioactive material that gets thrown in the atmosphere after a nuke explodes, could be chunks of metal, the “innards” of the bomb etc.
If the sand gets covered in fallout which means the sand is covered in radioactive material which means if you test the sand you’ll find fallout particles like iodine 131, cesium 137, strontium 90 etc, all which causes health issues. How far they can emit radiation?
I have no idea, probably far enough you’d want to stay faaaar away. Hope this helps.
There are three main components of nuclear fallout:
* Fission products — these are the remains of the atoms that got “split” by nuclear fission. They make up the most highly-radioactive part of nuclear fallout.
* Induced radioactivity — these were atoms that weren’t radioactive before, but after getting a big blast of neutrons, transform into more radioactive versions of their original selves. These tend to be pretty short lived, but are still an issue.
* Un-fissioned bomb fuel — all nuclear weapons only split some of their bomb fuel, and so there are bits of plutonium, uranium, and heavier atoms (some created by neutron bombardment, like einsteinium). These tend to be very long-lived, so they are not as immediately radioactive, but they are part of the long-term contamination risk.
The fission products and unfissioned fuel are part of the fireball, and become part of the cloud. Here is where you dust and debris come in: if the dust and debris mixes into the fireball (e.g., from a surface or near-surface burst), then those fission products will attach to them. This makes them heavier and causes them to “fall out” of the cloud earlier. It’s not the dust that’s the problem, it’s the fission products attached to the dust.
The induced byproducts are just anything within the area of the neutrons created by the explosion. So this includes the ground, includes metals, includes whatever. It can also include the air: nitrogen, for example, becomes radioactive carbon-14 under these conditions. So to answer your question, yes, air can be part of this.
The up-shot here is that when something light like air becomes radioactive, it doesn’t tend to have a _huge_ impact, because it is circulating for a long time before it gets brought back down to Earth and enters into ecological systems (e.g., by rain), making it relatively diffuse wherever you go (and not concentrated — it’s diluted). So radioactive carbon in the air is a long-term chronic risk (it increases everyone’s radioactivity by a tiny bit), not an immediate “if you walk through here after the detonation, you will get radiation sickness and die” risk (which is what the fission products are, if they fall out of the sand). The Soviet weapons designer Andrei Sakharov estimated that every megaton of nuclear explosion in the atmosphere would create enough carbon-14 to contribute to the deaths of 10,000 people over the course of 8,000 years (so a little less than one person per year).
As for the last question, if something is very radioactive, it can be felt as heat. The solid spheres of plutonium used in the first atomic bombs, for example, were radioactive enough that they were hot to the touch.
But most radioactivity is like a type of light that you can’t see without special instruments. So you wouldn’t feel anything warm to the touch, even though it could burn you (beta burns are a type of radiation burn).
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