Kind: captions
Language: en
Radiation has been in the news a lot
lately, but the term radiation has just
been thrown around loosely to mean
anything potentially damaging coming
away from a nuclear power plant.
So, what are people worried about?
That it's going to like explode and
release radiation.
But you don't know what's leaking or
radiation.
I don't think they actually know what
they're worried about getting out of the
reactor. So, I want to clear up this
confusion between radiation on the one
hand and the radioactive atoms that
release it on the other. The radiation
is the stuff, anything that radiates out
from a nucleus. We call it nuclear
radiation. Makes sense. And that's the
stuff that can actually do damage to
your molecules and cells. I have a
source here which releases uh beta
particles. And I have a geer counter
which makes a click every time it it
gets hit by a bit of radiation.
So you can see that there is a lot of
radiation coming from the source right
now. It's actually not that much but you
know it sounds like a lot. But what I
want to point out is that as I move the
Geiger counter away from the source
the radiation very quickly falls off.
A lot of this radiation can't really
pass through air.
What are we worried about like coming
out of the plant?
I guess the um probably the alpha
particles really.
But you're saying the alpha particles
can't get that far?
No, they can't. But
so why are we worried about them?
They're just going to like die when the
beta particles. They can
the alpha and beta radiation can be
absorbed by next to nothing. Doesn't
radiation drop off proportionately as it
goes along? Like and and it's not a
linear relationship, but it's more of a
negative exponential relationship. So,
if the radiation can't go very far, why
are we worried about it? Well, the truth
is we're not worried about the radiation
itself. We're worried about the
radioactive atoms that release it. So,
we're worried about the stuff in here.
In a nuclear power plant, there's a lot
of radioactive atoms that can escape
into the atmosphere, into the
environment in the case of an explosion.
And it is those radioactive atoms that
we're concerned about. These radioactive
atoms can be spread in the atmosphere
over hundreds of kilometers. And they
can effectively coat everything with a a
blanket of this radioactive dust. Then
you breathe it in or you eat it. And
it's at that point when the radioactive
atom is inside you that it releases its
radiation in a damaging way because then
the radiation is delivered directly to
your cells and it can cause damage to
your molecules and cells which can lead
to uh to health problems later on. So
it's not really radiation that we're
worried about directly seeping out
through the walls of nuclear power
plants. It's the radioactive material,
the radioactive atoms inside that we're
worried about escaping um and then doing
damage once they have reached us.