this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2024
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So there’s four types of radiation: alpha, beta, gamma, and neutron. When you’re talking about radioactive materials, it’s almost exclusively the first three. In addition to the inherent danger of the object itself, there’s also the danger of radioactive contamination: not making other things radioactive, but shedding bits of themselves as dust and then that dust getting on other things, or getting ingested/inhaled by humans.
Active fission reactions, like what goes on in the core of a nuclear reactor (or perhaps messing around with some plutonium and a screwdriver), produce neutron radiation. Neutrons can make other things radioactive, via a process called “neutron activation”, whereby the neutrons bind to the material and change some of the atoms into radioactive isotopes.
I hope that helps, and feel free to ask me anything else about radiation. I have some education about it thanks to my job, and I’m always happy to help other people understand it more as well.
Ha ! Turns out I'm right after all : radioactivation can happen with all type of radiations. But neutron activation is the lowest energy one.
You are right that it's probably a contamination for the book though, and not directly an activation (although carbon can be activated and will be found in the book).
The thing you said that someone disagreed with was calling it ionizing radiation, which is a more general term and describes radiation with enough energy to ionize an atom or molecule, which means stripping off at least one of its electrons. That requires a lot less energy than activating nuclei in an element that is not radioactive to radioactivity. UV light and X-rays are both ionising radiation, but are not from radioactivity and cannot induce radioactivity. Of course a lot of radioactive radiation (α, β, γ) is also too low-energy to activate more nuclei. It depends on the energy of the radiation and the specific element you're trying to activate (how close it is to being radioactive, so to speak).
So like CommissarVulpin said - the real danger is more likely to be contamination
Yeah, like you can activate small amounts of material with alpha particles from a particle accelerator like Cockcroft did or really bombarding them with relatively low energy concentrated alpha particles like Curie's daughter did, but it's not generally a major contributing factor to the radioactivity from just being around alpha emitters since you really have to do it very intentionally.
I know quite a bit about radioactivity thanks to my studies. I was sure all radiations could activate something, but it turns out I was wrong apparently because I can't find anything but neutron activation.
I'm pretty sure alpha, beta and gamma rays can stick to a particle, often bringing it in an unstable state that will force it to release something to get into a stable state. That's particle physics. And that's why we call them ionising radiations : because they turn atoms into ions. But my memories are definitely fuzzy, and it was not were I was the best.
Those radiations may only activate for a too short time to be useful maybe? I don't know.