
Going Nuclear
The Naked Scientists Podcast
00:00
Are Early Radioactive Particles in the Clouds?
Early radioactive elements are very rare in the air, but there will be some. What's actually happening to them to create these intricate structures in the cloud? Well, you often get an unstable nucleus. So for example, if you got a nucleus which is too big to be stable, randomly, quite rarely, a small lump of that nucleus o maybe two protons, neutrons, helium nucleus and alf particle,. These are both very positively charged. They repel each other very strongly. And so this nucleus will fly off with a huge amount of energy, creating an alf particle, which can do an awful damage when it hits things. That's what we're seeing with the thicker
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