Why does contact with radioactive material render the container hazardous as well? Or is it that it is impossible to remove all traces of the radiation source so that the container remains harmful due to the residue? Or did I rely too heavily on movies for my education, and the only thing that remains hazardous is the original nuclear material?
Thanks for listening,
Once in a while you can get shown the light
in the strangest of places
if you look at it right…
I think the answer to your second question is a big “yes”. Despite the way it’s treated in the popular imagination, radioactivity is not contagious; it doesn’t creep around multiplying like a high-tech slime mold.
Radioactive material, if it is deadly, can be harmful even in tiny quantities. If the nuclear core can melt you in half a second, a donut laced with core materials will probably give you cancer, or cook your internal organs, or ionize you or something horrible.
This is because some of the worst types of rays are not electromagnetic radiation at all, but rather, alpha and beta particles. These are nearly harmless when you are protected by a sufficient barrier, like human skin, but deadly as all hellfire when ingested. So standing next to a pile of alpha- and/or beta-emitting waste is pretty much safe, as long as you keep your eyes, nose, mouth and other orifices tightly shut.
The same goes for nuclear fallout. One of the worst after-effects of atomic blasts is the fact that it’s kind of hard to be a terrestrial organism without ingesting (inhaling, swallowing, whatever) at least a little bit of everything in the air. When this is relatively innocuous stuff like carbon monoxide and hydrogen cyanide from your pal’s cigarette, your body can cope. When it emits high energy ionizing nuclei, it’s a little more than piddling defenses like mucous membranes can properly defend against.
Yes. Actually, you probably could remove most of it, but you wouldn’t want to. What do you do with the water/solvent/whatever you used to clean the container? Instead of one highly contaminated bucket, you now have gallons of contaminated water and a slightly contaminated bucket.
This is not necessarily true. If you were to encase an alpha emitter in a box made of some stable element, eventually some of those alpha particles are going bump into the nucleus of those previously non-radioactive atoms and possibly make them radioactive. This doesn’t happen with all radiation, but it would happen in some cases. I’ll leave the actual nuclear reaction equations as an exercise for the grad students…