I understand something can become radioactive when it is polluted with radioactive material, The Claw (the crane which was used to clean up Chernobyl) comes into my mind. There is bad stuff on it -> radioactive.
But what about materials which are exposed to emission only? What changes in the material?
What happens for example when a steal plate is put inside LHC and bombarded with high energy particles? Does the protons collide with the electrons, become neutrons, so the iron in the “steal plate” changes into an isotope which is unstable, so it becomes radioactive?
In: Physics
In most cases it is just the case of radioactive dust collecting on the equipment. You get dust in every crevice, in the grease, in the bearings, between the fibres in the cloth, etc. This is also why just washing things that have been in radioactive contaminated areas helps as the radioactive particles gets washed away. Although then you have an issue with radioactive waste water.
There are also a number of nuclear reactions that make things radioactive. Most of these issues is with neutron radiation from a nuclear reactor or exploding bomb. The neutron can hit an atoms so hard that it embeds itself into the nucleus and changes its atomic number. This then most likely makes it one of the many radioactive isotopes there are and it will start its decay chain to a more stable isotope. But alpha-radiation can also do the same although this is not as common.
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