Tag: Recoil

The recoil of a nucleus during radioactive decay can do more damage than the alpha particle it emits, according to a new study.

Thorium-232 is a silvery, radioactive metal that is particularly good at absorbing X-rays. In the early days of X-ray imaging, doctors routinely injected patients with thorium dioxide because it produced high contrast images. Between the 1930s to the 1950s, some 10 million people received these doses.