What is radiation from nuclear explosions and how/why does it cause cancer?
In: R7 (Search First)
There is a cupple of types of radiation, but they are all smal particles with extrme speed aka energy. There is alpha, betta and gamma decay and they produce helium ions, electeons or photons.
Cancer is if a stemm cell in your body has a mutation that causes it to grow uncontrollable.
So a radiation particle can hit a cell in your body and damage the DNA in it. If you are realy realy unlucky that damage makes the cell multiply forever, thats cancer.
Imagine a bunch of tiny invisible niddles going through your body. They’re so tiny that you don’t feel any pain, and they only cut down the insides of your cells.
The damaged cells try to repair their damaged structure, but in the process, they have a higher likelihood of mutation and turning cancerous.
Of course, your body has natural defense against these mutations, but it’s not perfect, so more mutations mean more chance of getting cancer. It gets worse if the defense system itself is also damaged by radiation.
High energy radiation in the form of electrons and gamma waves are small enough to damage part of the DNA in your cells, and since DNA is needed to help your cells multiply, you don’t want damaged cells to multiply, because that’s how you get tumors. Gamma rays have a wave length of 10^-11 meters, which is small enough to fit in a cell, and electrons obviously are too. Alpha particles are just helium nuclei that can be easily blocked with light shielding, but you don’t want it inside of you since it is still ionizing.
Side note: this is why the “5G causes cancer” conspiracy theory is not true. 5G (and all communication signals) use microwave radiation, which is 30cm to 1mm in length, too large to fit in a cell and damage it.
When an unstable atom decays into a smaller and more stable atom, up until it gets as small as iron it takes less energy for that smaller atom to exist
Because you can’t destroy that energy it gets released from the new atom as a photon of energy, which is what radiation is
The only radiation you have to worry about in this way is Alpha, Beta, and Gamma radiation
Alpha is the most readily absorbed by materials, but does the most damage if it does get inside of your body, Gamma is the best at getting inside of you but does the least damage when it does, and Beta is in between
If you get hit by that photon of energy and it isn’t absorbed, it can hit a piece of DNA, and 99% of the time it won’t do anything because we are constantly exposed to a low level of radiation and our DNA developed to self correct in most cases. But when it does hit something and can’t be corrected for, that damage causes the instructions the cell follows to start messing up, which can result in cancer.
As you might imagine, radiation is mostly dangerous when we are exposed to a lot of it all at once, or constantly for a long period of time
As for how a nuclear explosion works, we get a lot of unstable atoms, and introduce a lot of energy to force them to decay all at once, which releases huge amounts of radiation in one big boom. Because radiation is mostly dangerous when you get a lot of it at once, and nuclear bombs produce a LOT of radiation, that’s one of the reasons they are so dangerous
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