How is cesium 137 made




















Among the many fission product nuclides, cesium deserves attention because it possesses a unique combination of physical properties and historical notoriety. It is readily produced in large quantities during fission, has an intermediate half-life, decays by high-energy pathways, and is chemically reactive and highly soluble. These physical properties have made cesium a dangerous legacy of major nuclear accidents such as Chernobyl, but it has also caused relatively small incidents as well.

Cesium is among the most common heavy fission products. Its half-life of about 30 years is long enough that objects and regions contaminated by cesium remain dangerous to humans for a generation or more, but it is short enough to ensure that even relatively small quantities of cesium release dangerous doses of radiation its specific radioactivity is 3. Along with its intermediate half-life, a combination of high-energy radioactivity and chemical reactivity makes cesium a particularly dangerous fission product.

Cesium undergoes high-energy beta decay, primarily to an excited nuclear isomer of Barium , which in turn undergoes gamma decay with a half-life of about seconds. Despite its prevalence in spent nuclear fuel and nuclear waste, cesium is actually extremely rare.

Its half-life is too short for it to persist from natural fission sources, and on earth it is a synthetic isotope only. What form is it in? What does it look like? How can I be exposed to Cs?

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Radionuclide Basics: Cesium On this page:. Cesium in the Environment Because Cs bonds with chlorides to make a crystalline powder, it reacts in the environment like table salt sodium chloride : Cesium moves easily through the air. Cesium dissolves easily in water. Cesium binds strongly to soil and concrete, but does not travel very far below the surface.

Plants and vegetation growing in or nearby contaminated soil may take up small amounts of Cs from the soil. Cesium Sources. Along with strontium 90 and a handful of plutonium isotopes, it will also be the principal source of radiation from radioactive waste for the next hundred or so years.

Strontium 90 and caesium are, in fact, the two principal fission products that have medium-length half-lives. About 10 kilograms of the former, and 24kg of the latter, are produced every year in a conventional pressurized water reactor PWR. Caesium is also one of the principal sources of radioactive contamination after nuclear reactor accidents. After Chernobyl, for instance, large quantities of caesium were released into the atmosphere, but by the levels of radiation had dropped below what they had been before the accident.

In the natural environment, caesium is far less mobile than iodine for instance.



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