What are the environmental problems related to radioactivity ?

Harm, effects and possible solutions|||the main problems with radioactive pollutants is their toxicity and long half-life. many pollutants released into the environment are short-lived - after a few minutes, hours, weeks or even months they will likely have been involved in a reaction that renders them inert or harmless. radioactive elements, on the other hand, do not decay into less-harmful substances for millions, often billions of years. so once they are released they are in the environment pretty much for good, and it is difficul t to collect them.





radioactive elements like uranium, thorium, plutonium etc are heavy metals - and heavy metals, for whatever reason, have a tendency to sequester in biological organisms. so, bacteria and plankton take some in, and fish that feed on them take in all of THEIR heavy metal content, and the birds that feed on the fish take in all of THEIR content.. and so on, all the way up the food chain. by the time you get to the top of the food chain, the large animals at the top (like humans!) take in a very heavy concentration of these contaminants.





having radioactive matter inside your body is a very, very bad thing. most radioactive elements decay by a process called "alpha emission" where they spontaneously decay by emitting an alpha particle. alphas are dangerous in a subtle way - they are weak enough that they don't travel very far in air - so standing next to an alpha emitter is not very dangerous. however, when the emitter is inside your body, the alphas don't have to travel very far to do damage to your cells! so having some alpha-emitting radioactive elements inside your body is far, far more hazardous than standing next to a million times as many atoms.





radiation from these elements is high-energy, which means it can break a lot of chemical bonds when it goes shooting through your body. the main problem here is that it damages your cells DNA, and since most of your cells die and are replaced after a few weeks/months, damaged DNA can very quickly spread through your body. this can have serious consequences - radiation exposure has been shown to cause cancer, particularly when ingested. damaged DNA also causes genetic defects so that one's offspring can be born with mutations - typically these are harmful and also can be passed on to later generations.





the only real solution is to carefully control how much radioactivity is released into the environment. this requires a good understanding of the industrial processes that generate radioactive pollutants and careful independent oversight to make sure that people aren't inadvertently (or intentionally) releasing them into the environment.





cheers!|||There is no solution to radioactive polution but it causes severe deformalities in animals and fish and plants. Also it alters the structure of our DNA so our children could come out squirlley.