How does uranium not contaminate nature with radioactivity if its naturally occuring?
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Most of the natural-occurring radioactive materials are too spread out to cause contamination the way most people think of. It’s possible for a uranium mine to still have some form of contamination or radiation exposure to the workers, but the ore itself isn’t too strong. That’s why nuclear power plants have to refine and concentrate the ore into a usable uranium form. When concentrated, that’s when it’s dangerous.
1) There is radiation around us everywhere at all times. Where are are will drive how much we are exposed to in the background. You are being exposed to radiation right now. But our bodies are used to this so it’s generally not that bad. Uranium is actually pretty safe to handle, just as long as you don’t breathe it in or lick it. There’s scarier stuff out there, like natural sunlight and radon, that we’re exposed to on a regular basis.
2) “Radioactivity” refers to how much radiation a substance puts out. Something that is not radioactive at all is not emitting radiation, something that is highly radioactive is eager to shed that radiation energy. Radiation itself is the energy that’s being emitted. And 99.9% of the time you can’t contaminate something with radiation alone, it has to be certain types of radiation interacting with certain substances. Otherwise, contamination only occurs when you mix radioactive stuff into non-radioactive stuff (like in the areas around Chernobyl, a lot of radioactive material in dusty particles got spread out and spread into the dirt).
Uranium in its most common natural state isn’t particularly dangerous provided it doesn’t get into your body – dust, for example, would be bad to breathe in and you wouldn’t want to eat it either. But you could be around it otherwise and be fine. The stuff used in power plants etc is highly highly enriched and contains much larger quantities of the more radioactive isotopes than you would find in its natural form.
It does. But radioactivity is caused by radioactive breakdown and in Uranium this happens really really slowly (the halflife, the time it takes for half the atoms in a sample to undergo radioactive breakdown, is 4.4 billion years for U-238 which is by far the most common version of Uranium) so it releases only very little radioactivity over your lifetime.
But still. Uranium breakdown is the reason why your granite countertop is slightly more radioactive than the material around it.
It’s also the reason why you might have to screen your basement for radon contamination. Once U-238 breaks down it breaks down into a series of relatively fast collapsing atoms until it reaches Radium-226. Which in turn breaks down into Radon-222. Radon-222 is a gas, so it escapes the material it was inside and slowly filters out of the rock to where it could come into close contact with humans. Radon radiation is an alpha emitter, which generally isn’t a problem since it’s stopped by very thin material (like the surface of human skin), but since Radon is also a gas it might end up in your lungs. So elevated levels of radon gas isn’t great.
It does. Slowly turns into lead.
But in its unrefined ore form it’s actually not too bad, as long as you don’t, idk, *eat it*. Sunlight is actually more radioactive and we’re (mostly) fine…
However, when you shove it in a nuclear reactor the uranium breaks down into smaller elements, like krypton or iodine… in a form with too many or too few neutrons, which makes the elements unstable and want to decay. THIS is the source of radioactivity in Chernobyl – radioactive waste breaking down and releasing radiation into the environment.
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