I’ve been researching nuclear energy and radiation in an effort to understand it. I don’t understand why I’m seeing a lot of info saying a nuclear bomb’s radiation dies out in about 10 years, but a nuclear reactor explosion like Chernobyl will take thousands of years. What’s the difference?
EDIT: Okay, so what I’m seeing is I didn’t account for the differences in types and sheer amounts of fuel for each kind of reaction. I’m not a chemist or physicist or anything. I just like learning stuff. 😁
These explanations make a lot of sense, so to those of you who didn’t answer the wrongway and provided helpful and educational responses, thank you.
In: Chemistry
in terms of safety, it’s not only duration of the radioactive substance, but also whether the chemical element gets absorbed and concentrated into certain parts of the body and thus bombarding some organs causing mutations of cells and the like some short half-life stuff are the worst. Iodine – many 8 days or a month or so half-life concentrate in thyroid, and easily generated in nuclear reactor accidents. Strontium 90 is something like 30 year half-life, comes from bombs, but because chemically similar to calcium, gets absorbed into the bones. Caesium is also 30-year scale, and also problematic. Bismuth (as in pepto-bismol) is naturally radioactive, with half-life in billions of years, but it is very weak so no problems. media often focused on nuclear reactor wastes – tons of it – and talks about the thousands / millions of years to decay. but that is really more a quantity / concentration problem. there are naturally-occurring nuclear reactions for millions of years in certain spots on earth (in africa, for instance), but they aren’t that toxic to us or much other life. we are actually more resilient to natural radiation than is portrayed (because we evolved with it). man-made concentrated stuff, including constant high altitude flying, we are not so well adapted.
Latest Answers