What is radioactive fallout made from?
Edited.
From a nuclear explosion?
Is it uranium or plutonium?
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9 Answers
You mean fallout? It’s a byproduct of fission and there is a lot of nasty stuff in it. Fortunately the worst of it is gone in days, if not hours.
I’m not an expert, but it’s always been my understanding that fallout is ordinary dust and smoke particles that were ejected high into the stratosphere by the denotation of a nuclear weapon and then those tiny particles become contaminated with extremely high levels of radioactivity. As the jet stream carries these aerosolized radioactive particles around, they can be captured by clouds and precipitate out as radioactive rain that can contaminate bodies of water and the ground. Not sure if this is 100% accurate though.
The blast wave creates lots of dust at ground level and this dust gets mixed with the radioactive elements of the bomb, lifted into the sky by the heat of the mushroom cloud and falls out of the sky as fallout. What @gorillapaws said above is very accurate.
Atomic explosions with radioactive elements in them when the atoms collide and produce nuclear fusion which then rains down upon the ground. You don’t want to be anywhere near that when it happens. Or playing Fallout 4. :)
As you can imagine the detonation of ten million tons of TNT creates a lot of dust which is carried up into the atmosphere in a fireball before being carried by prevailing winds and dropped back down to earth as fallout. In the case of a nuclear bomb that dust is mingled with the products of nuclear fission such as radioactive isotopes of iodine caesium strontium xenon and barium.
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