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Sources of Exposure. Radon Testing. Reducing Radon Exposure. Overview of Radon and Lung Cancer. The Importance of Radon Testing and Mitigation. Was this page helpful? Thanks for your feedback! Sign Up. What are your concerns?
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Related Articles. Environmental Causes of Lung Cancer. Types of Carcinogens in the Environment. Radon is a cancer-causing radioactive gas. You cannot see, smell or taste radon, but it may be a problem in your home. The Surgeon General has warned that radon is the second leading cause of lung cancer in the United States today. Some scientific studies of radon exposure indicate that children may be more sensitive to radon.
This may be due to their higher respiration rate and their rapidly dividing cells, which may be more vulnerable to radiation damage. The discovery is also credited to German physicist Friedrich Ernst Dorn in Radon is a colorless chemically-unreactive inert gas. The atomic radius is 1. Because it is a single atom gas unlike oxygen, O2, which is comprised of two atoms it easily penetrates many common materials like paper, leather, low-density plastic like plastic bags, etc.
Radon is also fairly soluble in water and organic solvents. Although reaction with other compounds is comparatively rare, it is not completely inert and forms stable molecules with highly electronegative materials. Radon is considered a noble gas that occurs in several isotopic forms. This method of radon detection is based widely upon the physics of semiconductor devices. They are mainly used for a long-term analysis of radon concentration in a particular region. Semiconductor devices can be used to track the electron-hole pairs generated along the path of a charged particle.
For Radon detection, alpha particles produced as the progeny of radon decay are collected on a semiconductor-based screen, which can give us readings on how much increase in radon concentration is there over a period of time.
There are 39 isotopes of Radium, ranging from mass no. Other isotopes of radon are too short-lived to have any real significance. Radon Rn is a colourless, tasteless, and odourless gas at standard pressure and temperature conditions, and it is the densest noble gas known.
At normal temperature and pressure conditions, radon generally exists in a gaseous state. At normal temperature and pressure conditions, radon generally exists as a monoatomic gas with a gas density of about 9. As we lower the temperature further, the yellow colour changes to a bright orange-red colour.
Radon is compactly soluble in water as compared to its solubility in other noble gases. Furthermore, radon can dissolve easily in most of the organic compounds. Radon belongs to the noble gas group of the periodic table with atomic no. The problem scientists encounter while studying the chemistry of radon is that it has a very short half-life, and hence, it is explored by tracer methods. For a long time, radon was found unreactive in many attempts, but after the discovery of the first noble gas compound, xenonplatino fluoride, and other subsequent noble gas compounds, it has been found that radon can also form compounds with fluorine and other complex salts.
A clathrate is a structure in which water molecules under certain conditions bond to form complex networks of molecules forming cage-like structures that encapsulate a guest molecule, which is a gas.
Radon forms a series of clathrates when mixed in trace amounts with relatively larger amounts of other substances such as sulphur dioxide, hydrogen sulphide, phenol, p-chlorophenol, and water after its phase transition.
This method of selective formation of radon hydrates can also be used to separate radon from a mixture of noble gases. The radioactive nature and a short-lived half-life of radon make it harder for scientists to conduct research on radon compounds. However, scientists have managed to form difluorides of radon in very minute quantities, under a very isolated and precise procedure.
The products of these fluorination reactions have not been analyzed yet because of their small mass and intense radioactivity. Nevertheless, by comparing reactions of radon with those of krypton and xenon, it is safe to deduce that radon forms a difluoride, RnF2, and derivatives of the difluoride. Theoretically, radon can form other compounds also with halogens and organic compounds, but due to its intense radioactivity, scientists can not prove those predictions to be true.
Ironically, the radioactive nature of radon made it employable also. It was first discovered as a radioactive gas produced from radium as it decayed.
Help text not available for this section currently. Elements and Periodic Table History. In , Ernest Rutherford and Robert B. Owens detected a radioactive gas being released by thorium. That same year, Pierre and Marie Curie detected a radioactive gas emanating from radium.
In, Friedrich Ernst Dorn at Halle, Germany, noted that a gas was accumulating inside ampoules of radium. They were observing radon. That from radium was the longer-lived isotope radon which has a half-life 3. The radon that Rutherford detected was radon with a half-life of 56 seconds. In , Rutherford devoted himself to investigating the new gas and showed that it was possible to condense it to a liquid. In , William Ramsay and Robert Whytlaw-Gray at University College, London, collected enough radon to determine its properties and reported that it was the heaviest gas known.
Atomic data. Glossary Common oxidation states The oxidation state of an atom is a measure of the degree of oxidation of an atom. Oxidation states and isotopes. Glossary Data for this section been provided by the British Geological Survey. Relative supply risk An integrated supply risk index from 1 very low risk to 10 very high risk. Recycling rate The percentage of a commodity which is recycled.
Substitutability The availability of suitable substitutes for a given commodity. Reserve distribution The percentage of the world reserves located in the country with the largest reserves. Political stability of top producer A percentile rank for the political stability of the top producing country, derived from World Bank governance indicators.
Political stability of top reserve holder A percentile rank for the political stability of the country with the largest reserves, derived from World Bank governance indicators. Supply risk. Relative supply risk Unknown Crustal abundance ppm 0. Young's modulus A measure of the stiffness of a substance.
Shear modulus A measure of how difficult it is to deform a material. Bulk modulus A measure of how difficult it is to compress a substance. Vapour pressure A measure of the propensity of a substance to evaporate. Pressure and temperature data — advanced. Listen to Radon Podcast Transcript :. You're listening to Chemistry in its element brought to you by Chemistry World , the magazine of the Royal Society of Chemistry.
The first reports of problems associated with radon gas in domestic buildings was in the United States in , when an employee at a nuclear power plant began setting off the radiation detector alarms on his way into work. The problem was eventually traced to his home, where the level of radon gas in his basement was found to be abnormally high.
Radon emanates directly from the ground all over the world but especially in regions with high levels of granite or shale in the soil. Uranium, a relatively common constituent of soils, decays to form radium, which in turn decays to produce radon.
In fact for most UK residents, naturally occurring radon accounts for half of their annual radiation dosage. However it only really becomes problematic when high levels are produced in confined spaces, for example the ground floor of buildings without adequate ventilation. Some homes in Cornwall, where the ground has high granite content, were found to contain worrying levels of radon. However forced ventilation methods largely remove the problem. Radon is the product of the decay of other unstable, radioactive elements such as radium, thorium and actinium.
The colourless, odourless, tasteless gas can be isolated from these sources but soon decays as it has no stable isotopes. The early pioneers in the study of radioactivity, the Curies, had noted that radium appeared to make the surrounding air radioactive. The discovery of radon is credited to a German physicist Friedrich Ernst Dorn, who traced this observed radioactivity to a gas which was given off by radium - a gas which he called 'radium emanation'.
Similar 'emanations' were isolated from other elements - for example thorium, and eventually the gas was identified as the heaviest of the noble gases, named radon, and given its rightful place in the periodic table. Not much research has been carried out on radon, due to its radioactivity, but it is largely un-reactive with few known compounds. Like the other noble gases it has been found to form compounds with fluorine. It is the densest known gas, another reason why it tends to linger in low-lying confined spaces.
Below its boiling point it forms a colourless liquid and then at lower temperatures an orange-red solid which glows eerily due to the intense radiation it produces. Radon has a fairly short half-life of only a few days so rapidly decays. Why then should we worry about radon levels in our homes? The problem is, when breathed in, it can decay to form other, longer-lasting, solid radioactive species, which can coat the lungs, leading to continual exposure.
These so-called 'radon daughters' include polonium, polonium and lead - not family members you'd wish to spend a lot of time with. Prolonged radon exposure is believed to be the second most frequent cause of lung cancer after smoking. The unfortunate gentleman with the basement full of radon had a risk of consequentially developing lung cancer equivalent to smoking packs of cigarettes every day!
So now that I'm comfortable in my freshly decorated new home, all that remains for me to do is to check that my surroundings are as safe as they look. Fortunately that's easily done these days with radon test kits which you can order online. You place them in the corner of a room for three months and forget about them and then send them away to be analysed.
But maybe don't take a deep breath before you open the results from the lab, just in case.
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