Uranium Research Paper

Uranium is a crucial part of everyday life in the 21st century, however, the mining of this element likely contributed to countless cases of pulmonary diseases. To cover the scope of this paper one needs to understand what uranium is and why is it dangerous, how it interacts with the people around it, and what is being done to ensure safety in this occupation? Indirectly we use uranium every day to generate power via fission. The splitting of the atom produces heat, which in turn produces steam, the steam then turns generators which provide a source of power. Sequoyah can supply enough power to meet the needs of about 1.3 million homes in the Tennessee Valley each day.1 Nuclear power is a useful tool in providing clean and efficient energy,
Uranium is a naturally occurring and abundant radionuclide with a half-life of approximately 4.5 billion years. Since uranium is an unstable element, it decays by ejecting alpha particles in order to become stable. Through this decay process radon and other radioisotopes are produced, however this paper will focus on radon and its prodigies. Radon is an alpha particle with a half-life of 3.8 days, and it has minimal potential for damage outside the body because it lacks the ability to penetrate more than a few centimeters of air or tissue. However, radon is very ionizing when inhaled or ingested and can be very damaging to tissues. In addition to radon, radon daughters also have a high potential to damage tissue and are more common than radon. The daughter radionuclides (215Po, 214Bi, 214Pb, 211Po) collectively have an average half-life of about 30 minutes. When formed in the air of a mine, they quickly become attached to solid surfaces, most notably dust particles. When these dust particles are inhaled, radiation is delivered to the nose, pharynx, and tracheobronchial tree. Where the dust particles are deposited, the radiation dose delivered
In the late 1800s the illness was diagnosed as lung cancer, but it was not until 1921 that radon gas was suggested as the possible cause.4 Uranium is a fairly common element in the earth’s crust so it's no surprise that most underground mines will contain some amount of radiation. Even though early miners were unaware of the biologic damage taking place at the moment, the long term effects of the radiation would become apparent several years later. The high–linear energy transfer alpha particles emitted by radon and radon daughters can directly attack genomic DNA and cause double-strand breaks in DNA. In addition, overproduction of reactive oxygen species in the lungs caused by persistent radon exposure may cause oxidative stress, leading to pulmonary inflammation, tissue damage, and eventually to chronic lung diseases such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), pulmonary fibrosis, and lung cancer. 5 Since the effects of radon exposure are long term, it took several years for scientist to notice a trend in pulmonary disease. Although radon was suspected to be carcinogenic around 1940, it was several years later before evidence based studies proved a correlation between the two. By 1959, the PHS study of US uranium miners had shown that there was a