Radon - The Unwelcome Houseguest
Chris Bolhuis (00:14):
You like it. When I start recording, then I start doing this. Yeah.
Jesse Reimink (00:18):
Yup!
Chris Bolhuis (00:18):
So that's what I'll do.
Jesse Reimink (00:19):
It's the best.
Chris Bolhuis (00:20):
Join us today.
Jesse Reimink (00:21):
Oh, he's got the sexy voice on today. Wow.
Chris Bolhuis (00:27):
Thank you for calling. What can I do for you?
Jesse Reimink (00:31):
That is a voice for radio right there.
Chris Bolhuis (00:35):
I got the face to go along with it.
Jesse Reimink (00:37):
I'm good. Oh man, let's go. Let's go. Oh, Chris, you've got an interesting shirt on today. All I can see is beards it's in the top half a. T-shirt what what's going on there? What do we got
Chris Bolhuis (00:48):
Me? Let me sit up a little bit straighter and
Jesse Reimink (00:50):
You see, oh, Beard's Brewery. Oh, it's a brewery.
Chris Bolhuis (00:54):
A hop leaf with a hop cone coming down as the beard, you know, and it kind of like, it fits my beard. Right. Because it's kind of cone shaped, you know? And I got that. Try and get that look going on.
Jesse Reimink (01:03):
You really do. I was going to mention it. Your beard is looking particularly flush today. The top of your head's swooped less so, but the, you know, the bottom part of your face is pretty flush with hair.
Chris Bolhuis (01:14):
Yeah, I know. I, I know. I, I do need to, it's getting a little outta control. I have to take care of it.
Jesse Reimink (01:18):
It's looking good though. I, you know. Yeah, it's good. Thanks. I'm I'm proud to be doing this podcast with it.
Chris Bolhuis (01:24):
You know you, I think if you would try to grow facial hair, it would look, you'd look like a Teen Wolf. Splotchy
Jesse Reimink (01:33):
Totally teed Wolf. I cannot grow facial hair for, for. I mean, it looks real bad. One time Tess you know, don't clean shave because a little bit of you know, gruff is...
Chris Bolhuis (01:47):
It's man style.
Jesse Reimink (01:49):
But then she's like, but you, you have to keep it trim. Like you have to keep it really tight. Cause it looks pretty grim.
Chris Bolhuis (01:56):
However, nobody can grow a disgusting Neard. Like you
Jesse Reimink (02:01):
That's true. Oh
Chris Bolhuis (02:02):
My gosh. You can grow a Neard like none other
Jesse Reimink (02:06):
Yep. Award winning.
Chris Bolhuis (02:09):
Heylet's get into this. You
Jesse Reimink (02:12):
Ready? Let's do it, man. This is I'm excited. Are you excited?
Chris Bolhuis (02:16):
I'm always excited. So that's kind of a dumb question.
Jesse Reimink (02:19):
Fair point fair point.
Chris Bolhuis (02:21):
I'm ready to go. Well heck yeah. This was your idea.
Jesse Reimink (02:25):
Well, yeah, in part because when did you guys buy your house that you're living in now? Have you been there for
Chris Bolhuis (02:30):
Decades? , almost almost 10 years.
Jesse Reimink (02:32):
Yeah. Almost. Okay. Yep. So Tess and I just bought a house in Pennsylvania and because the crazy housing market, we kind of had to waive inspections. I mean we looked at the house and walked through it and it looked in pretty good shape. So we are a little bit comfortable waiving inspections, but Radon is something that often gets inspected if you don't have a Radon system in your house, which ours actually has. So, and, and we're going to talk, it's like fundamentally linked to
Chris Bolhuis (03:00):
Geos. Wait, what? You have a Radon system. What does that mean? Like what?
Jesse Reimink (03:03):
Well, it's just like a, the Radon pipes that, that sort of vent underneath of the, the floor. So it's just a vent system basically that gets rid of radar.
Chris Bolhuis (03:13):
Do I have one of those?
Jesse Reimink (03:14):
You might, I don't know. Some, some houses do some get installed. They're relatively simple, but we'll get to that. Like how to, to sort of get rid of them and I can talk about what mine actually looked like in the house.
Chris Bolhuis (03:26):
I feel like that's something I should know, but I, I really have no idea.
Jesse Reimink (03:29):
Well, so we're going to talk about Radon because this is Geoscience. We get to cover a lot of cool geoscience stuff here with Radon.
Chris Bolhuis (03:36):
Absolutely. And you know, it is important. There, there are billboards you see like have you had your home tested and there's a phone number that you can call and have people come out and do it. I've seen those before. And one of the main reasons is because it is radioactive and Radon is a gas. And so it is isn't it? I think this is true. It's the, the second leading cause of lung cancer behind smoking.
Jesse Reimink (03:59):
If you're a non-smoker this is the number one cause of lung cancer in, in the U.S. At least
Chris Bolhuis (04:05):
So well, hold on. I think, let's , let's give a little bit of prelude of what we're going to do. So we've kind of have this chunked up into three sections. We need to get into radioactive decay and how that works. Um, we've, we've touched on it before in previous episodes. We're going to do it again in this context. So that the first chunk, then we're going to talk about the geology of Radon and how it moves and how all that happens. And then the, the last section today is going to be all right, well it's in your house now. What, what do you do,
Jesse Reimink (04:31):
Right. Yeah. And it's a really important thing for sure. This is just such a cool, one of the many directly applicable geoscience things in our lives. Like, you know, we talk about minerals, we talk about the importance of geoscience. You know, this is a really like directly important aspect of geosciences, how Radon gets into your house and why we should worry about it. So radioactive decay, this is a fun one. And this is part I just want to touch on why it's toxic, right? Like this is kind of entrenched in why Radon is a bad thing to have around in significant concentrations. So Radon is an element and its chemical symbol is RN. That's, you know, the, the periodic table has all these symbols. RN is Radon and it's a noble gas.
Chris Bolhuis (05:14):
What does that mean? Explain that real quick.
Jesse Reimink (05:17):
Yeah. Noble gas is, you know, they're on the far right side of the periodic table. They have a full electron, an outer electron shell. So they don't bond with anything really. So they like to exist in the gas phase.
Chris Bolhuis (05:27):
They're very stable when something is a noble gas, it's very non-reactive and it's very stable. Now we say that from the standpoint of a full, like, you know, all of its energy levels of full of electrons, however we're going to go into now, why is it radioactive then if it's stable, now we have to talk about inside the nucleus. So we're really kind of talking about two different things.
Jesse Reimink (05:51):
Yeah. That's a great point, Chris. Yeah, absolutely great point. So electrons and the outer outer shells that determines chemistry, chemical reactivity, we're talking about the nuclear physics and the, in what happens in the nucleus is whether it breaks down or not. And Radon yeah. Is sorry,
Chris Bolhuis (06:07):
Nuclear chemistry is what you're talking about when you dive into like radioactive decay. So these are changes that happen inside the nucleus. And so let's get into real quick. The what makes certain, because they're not all elements are radioactive only certain ones that, you know, you look at Periodic table and only a few of them are radioactive. And what all that means is that the nucleus of that atom is unstable. And so it's, it's going to spontaneously change to be, it's going to do something to become more stable, not necessarily like stable, but just more stable than it was
Jesse Reimink (06:47):
That's right. And the way to think about this, a good analogy is, okay, primer, the nucleus of an atom is the really compact thing in the center that holds all the mass. It has protons and neutron in it, those protons and neutrons, you can kind of think of these things as they're vibrating, their little Springs, all of them are kind of bound to each other and they're all kind of vibrating, right? So they're kind of shifting around, you have this mass of 222 protons and neutrons. They're all vibrating together. Now, every once in a while and a random instant half of them will vibrate in one direct to the right, the other half will vibrate to the left and the animal will kind of split apart. That's just a, an example of sort of how this happens. These things are vibrating mass and randomly, some of them will break off because they all vibrated in one direction and, and then they, they sort of lose stability. So that's kind of how this happens. And it's a sort of a very fast process that he's losing mass from the nucleus. So we are creating two particles from one bigger one.
Chris Bolhuis (07:43):
So what I'd like to do, I think before we get into like how this actually happens, let's talk a little bit about the way that radioactive decay happens. The, you know, what happens in the nucleus? You know, let's keep this as, as simple as we can, but there are, are three basic modes of decay. And we say that decay, we're just talking about how the nucleus is going to change. And when that happens, it's it's called decay. The first one, I think it's the most common in terms of going to Radon anyway, is called alpha decay. So what this involves is you have an atom that is unstable and it changes by emitting an alpha particle. We call that alpha decay and an alpha particle is just simply it's, it's one particle that is made up of two protons and two neutrons, which is essentially the nucleus of a helium atom.
Chris Bolhuis (08:39):
Like if you take, then let's say uranium two thirty eight, when we call it uranium two thirty eight, it's atomic number 92, but it has a mass of 238 and the rest of the mass. So you have 92 protons. The rest of it is made up of neutrons. Okay. Yeah. If you take uranium 238, it's an unstable atom and it spontaneously just changes. It emits that particle two protons and two neutrons, a helium atom. And so the new particle is going to have a mass minus what it lost and it lost two protons and two neutrons, which means it's lost a mass of four units, four mass units. Okay. And now you have 90 protons, which is the identity of the element. And so now what you have instead of uranium, you have thorium 2 34. So we started with uranium 238. Now we have thorium 2 34, and that's also going to be radioactive it's unstable and it will change two.
Jesse Reimink (09:51):
Absolutely. This is the key point, right? Is that these things break down and actually the interesting thing about Radon is it is not only itself radioactive, meaning it is unstable and it breaks down and that's why it's damaging to us. But it also is the product of decay. So you talked about 238 uranium, actually 238 uranium. It starts to decay. And once it starts that process, once it kicks out a helium atom it and becomes 234 Thorium, it goes under this long chain of decay. It decays down, through a whole bunch of different elements all the way till it gets to 206 lead in Radon. The one that we most often worry about is 222 Radon. It kind of sits right in the middle of that process. It is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 steps from uranium to Radon and then another about 10 or 12 steps to get to lead at the end. So not only is Radon radioactive, but it also is radiogenic it is produced by radioactive decay, which is a really important part about the geology of it, which we will get to.
Chris Bolhuis (10:52):
The other common type of decay is called beta decay. And what beta decay is, is when the nucleus of an atom emits a very high energy electron, okay. Now electrons essentially have no mass. I mean, it, it it's ridiculously small. So the mass of the new isotope, what we call it, the daughter isotope, the mass is going to be the same, but I lost an electron. Okay. Now this is something that really is interesting to me, Jesse, because with my students. And I'm sure you, I, I bet you, I bet you money. I you'll correct me if I'm wrong, but I bet you, your students, it doesn't occur to them. Wait a second, beta decay. We teach this, they know about it. They know they learn about it in chemistry class. Right. But they hardly ever ask the question, wait a second, there aren't any electrons in the nucleus. So how does this happen?
Jesse Reimink (11:48):
Where does the electron come from? Yeah, that's right. Exactly. So where does it come from, Chris? Where does the electron come from?
Chris Bolhuis (11:54):
Yeah, if you think about then what a neutron is, a neutron is a neutral particle, so it has no charge and it has a massive one. Well, if you take a proton and an electron together and you know, just mash them together, you have something that has no charge and it has a massive one. So a neutron is made up of those two subatomic particles. So when beta decay happens, think about this neutron vibrating and all of a sudden just kicks out this electron, the proton stays, right? So your atomic number will go up by one because now I have a proton that used to be a neutron and I lost no mass. So that's how beta decay happens. And this is confusing when you're first getting exposed to this kind of thing, because they're like, wait a second. The atomic number goes up, but I lost something, you know?
Jesse Reimink (12:52):
Yeah. It'svery confusing.
Chris Bolhuis (12:56):
But it's not, if you understand what a neutron is.
Jesse Reimink (13:01):
And so there are two types of decay, like you said, these are the dominant ones. There's a few other ones which are not important for most
Chris Bolhuis (13:07):
Electron capture and others.
Jesse Reimink (13:08):
Yeah. They're not super important, but both of these modes of decay occur from a path from uranium down to lead. And as we said, there's like 16 or 18 steps in that process. So both of these are occurring in this way and Radon sits right in the middle of it. So ultimately, Chris, what is the source of Radon that makes it maybe into your basement? Like where is that coming from?
Chris Bolhuis (13:31):
Ultimately I'm so glad you asked this question. Ultimately it comes from uranium 238. That is the source of Radon 222. So can I do this, Jesse? Just bear with me a minute.
Jesse Reimink (13:50):
Oh man. Okay. I I'm, I feel like I'm always bearing with you, you know? So, I'll do it for one more minute and then we're done.
Chris Bolhuis (13:58):
Okay. But, but hold on before we do this, though, we have to also refresh one thing too. What is the half-life okay. Oh yeah. Each radioactive development has its own half-life and all that means is the half-life is the time it takes for half of the atoms that are present to decay.
Jesse Reimink (14:19):
Let me try the analogy. Let me see if I get your analogy, right? Because it's a great one. This the shoebox analogy? Is this where you're going to go? Okay. I had used it in class the other day and I want to make sure I get there right here. So basically you take, let me go with it. You take your shoebox, right? Chris, Chris ice is grabbing his shoebox. Maybe he's got some new, you know, Asics that he, he is about to rock out in the retirement home.
Chris Bolhuis (14:39):
I'm I'm an old man. Now I've gone to Hoka
Jesse Reimink (14:42):
Hoka. That's great. That's really good. That's a good visual right there. So you take your Hoka shoebox, you fill it up with a whole bunch of pennies and you shake it for
Chris Bolhuis (14:52):
Unknown amount of pennies, put a hundred pennies in it or put 50 in it. Put it whatever. It's have to be a known amount.
Jesse Reimink (14:58):
Yep. Let's do a hundred. I like a hundred. That's nice. And even shake it up for five shakes five or maybe five seconds, 10 seconds. Then you open it up and you take out all the pennies that have tails facing up. That's what I always would go with with the heads or tails thing. I'd always go with tails. So we're going to take out the tails. How many are going to be left? Half round. About 50, right? Okay. Is that the analogy? That's one half-life and then we put the shoebox back on, shake it up for another five seconds. Open it up. You only have 25 left after you take out all the ones with tails in it. So because it's this probabilistic phenomenon radioactive decay. Right.
Chris Bolhuis (15:32):
And the important part about this is that nothing changes the half-life of an element. Okay. You can't like heat it up or squeeze it a lot with under immense pressure. The half-life is well established. So each element has its own half-life right. The time it takes for half of the Adams that are present to decay. So uranium 238 decays by alpha decay into thorium 234. And it's got a halfway from 4.5 billion year.
Jesse Reimink (16:02):
That first decay step. Yeah.
Chris Bolhuis (16:04):
Yes. Thorium 234 will decay by beta decay. So it's going to emit an electron, the nucleus and it has a half-life of only 24.1 days. And that will change by thorium 234 changes into protium 234, no change in mask. All we lost is an electron very high energy electron. Right? So protium 234 changes also by beta decay, back into uranium, 234 back up to atomic number 92. So I have two more protons that I didn't have before. Because I went through two bees in a, in a row now protium has a half-life of 1.17 minutes. Okay. So uranium 234 decays by alpha into thorium 230 half-life 240,000 years. So we're, we're back up to a long time now we're
Jesse Reimink (17:03):
Back to a long half-life yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Chris Bolhuis (17:05):
Thorium 230 goes alpha decay to radium 226. Now we're getting close. Okay. Thorium 230 is a half-life of 77,000 years. And then here we go. The final step radium 226 alpha decay changes into Radon 222 and radium 226 is a halfl-ife of 1600 years, 1,600 years. Now we have Radon 222 in your home. Okay. That's what we're talking about. It's a gas and we'll talk about why that's important. And it's also important to note that that's also going to change down into other things all the way down to lead 206, right. But it has a half life of 3.8 days. So it doesn't stay long. That's how you go. You asked me and I had to do this, say the ultimate source. It starts with uranium 238.
Jesse Reimink (18:03):
It's got all these steps in between. Right? And so there's two important points here that were sort of leading into the first is if you've listened to PlanetGeo or if you're familiar with what enriched uranium is, there's multiple types of uranium. Chris, you've been talking about 238 uranium, which is the key one for, producing Radon. Right. But there's 235 uranium as well out there.
Chris Bolhuis (18:25):
So why aren't we concerned about that?
Jesse Reimink (18:28):
It's a great question. Why are we not concerned about the Radon? Because Radon is in the decay chain of 235 uranium uranium 235 starts to decay. It breaks down all the way to lead somewhere in the middle is Radon. The reason we don't care about it is because there's very little uranium, 235 in the world today out of 138 atoms of uranium that you find only one of them is the going to be 235 uranium. The other 137 are going to be uranium 238. So the vast majority of uranium out there is 238 uranium. Now the other reason we don't care about the 235 decay chain is because the half-life of Radon in the 235 version of it, the 235 Uranium flavor has a half-life of 55 seconds. That's very short. So that is going to decay away very quickly.
Chris Bolhuis (19:18):
It's there and it's gone,
Jesse Reimink (19:20):
It's there and it's gone, right? The half-life of 222 Radon which is the one in the 238 decay chain has a halfl-ife of, as you said, 3.8 days now that's law long enough to matter for us. And why does this matter? Like why do we care about the length of the half-life here for this Radon step in the decay?
Chris Bolhuis (19:38):
Because it's long, it's there long enough for us to go down and inhale it, because it's a gas. We can, we can ingest this into our system. So we have that. That's not good because it's radioactive. But then it all also changes. It continues to change. Yes. You know, and, and it's only a gas in Radon. That's the only time that this whole decay series exists in the gas form.
Jesse Reimink (20:08):
Okay. So now we're kind of shifting into the second part of this thing is the geology of Radon. Did, are
Chris Bolhuis (20:12):
We ready to do that? Right? Are
Jesse Reimink (20:13):
We ready to? I think we are because we're right. We're right on the cusp of it. I think here you nailed it. This is the only step in this whole 16 or 17 step to decay chain where this uranium 238 atom has turned into a gas phase. So Radon is the gas, which means it can move all those other ones, thorium, radium, those don't move. Those elements are bound in whatever mineral or clay that the uranium existed in. Originally, as soon as it hits radar, it doesn't stick to anything. It does not chemically react so it can move. It can flow in airspace and that's how it gets into your basement basically. So We kind of have to step back and talk about like where uranium occurs in, in geoscience. Right? Cause like, like, okay, you know, Ray's coming from uranium, but why is the uranium there? What's it existing in like where does a start? How does uranium behave?
Chris Bolhuis (21:08):
Yeah. So now we get into the geology of this podcast. Okay. Here we,
Jesse Reimink (21:13):
Here we go.
Chris Bolhuis (21:15):
So look, you're the expert on this hands down. I bow you on this. Okay. But I'll, I'll give it a go and you can interrupt me. All right.
Jesse Reimink (21:24):
But okay.
Chris Bolhuis (21:26):
Uranium is fairly common in certain kinds of rocks on in the continental crust. Okay. It's common in rocks like granite, it's common in certain sedimentary rocks and it's therefore, when these rocks break down, then they've form soil chemically. They'll break down mechanically, they'll break down and it forms soil, what our homes are sitting in and on. Okay. All right. How did I do?
Jesse Reimink (22:01):
I mean, it's perfect. Yeah. I think that's a really important point because you know, Radon is coming out of the soil. The most homes are built in soil. They're not built in bedrock or anything like that. Right? Like our basements, if you have a basement, it's sitting in soil of some kind that soil comes from weathering of a rock. It's breaking down a rock and there's uranium in the rock and therefore there's uranium in the soil. Right. And the other aspect about soil is that it provides all these little air spaces so that when Radon is formed, that Radon can go into those air space and start to move around quite quickly. And so I think we need to touch on a couple of key geoscience terms here with regard to sediments, which is porosity and permeability. Chris, do you think it's time to talk about the, that? Yeah
Chris Bolhuis (22:49):
I do. Because those things help control the mobility of Radon when it, once it hits that gas form, it can move. So if you are, are talking about a soil or a sedimentary rock that has a high porosity. What we're talking about simply is the spaces between the grains, like your, you know, your skin is very porous. A sponge is very porous. Okay. It's the spaces between the, the other pieces, the solid pieces, right? It's the air. Okay.
Jesse Reimink (23:22):
And we talk about porosity in a percent. So it's the percent of stuff. That's not a mineral, basically. It's the percent air.
Chris Bolhuis (23:29):
I, I can, I can maybe give an analogy with this. If you take like a five gallon bucket of loose beach sand and fill it all the way up to the tippy top. Right? All right. Well, what's the porosity of that. Well, you can measure the porosity by how much water can you pour into that bucket without changing the volume?
Jesse Reimink (23:50):
Oh, that's a good one. Without the water spilling out of the top of the bucket. That's that's a good one. Yeah.
Chris Bolhuis (23:54):
With loose sand, you pour the water in and you can with a five gallon bucket fold of the tippy top, you can put in about two and a half gallons of water. So that water pushing out the air, you know, you see it start to bubble as you pour water in. And what that means then is sand has a 50 percent-ish porosity. Okay. 50% of the sand is just airspace. Okay. Well, if that's what you have, you got a soil that has a high porosity, a lot of air in between the grains. That means then that rain on can move through that easily. Right? So high porosity favors mobile Radon
Jesse Reimink (24:35):
Yeah. A different, but related term is permeability, which is the ability of stuff to flow through there. So it's the interconnectedness of all those pores. So you could imagine a scenario, Chris, with your let's go back to your bucket, sand and the bucket and algae. Cause that's a great one that sand, if you just pour a bunch of sand grains in there and fill it up, that is very permeable because the water can flow all the way to the bottom of that bucket really easily. And if you put a screen on the sand and tip the bucket over the water's going to flow out of there really easy it's permeable, the water can flow. If instead you take, you fill up that bucket with a rock that has a big hole in the middle, a single hole that is a solid rock with just one big hole. You can still have 50% porosity. There can be one big pour that is two and a half gallons sitting right in the middle. And you can fill that with water and tip it upside down. And it's never going to flow out of that enclosure. So think of like a big bubble of water locked in a rock capsule. It's not going anywhere, poor cement in there. Maybe let's make it a cement analogy. Right? Like
Chris Bolhuis (25:36):
I had no idea where you were going with that analogy, by the way,
Jesse Reimink (25:39):
Did it, does it make sense or not? Was this a terrible analogy?
Chris Bolhuis (25:42):
Let me give another go at it and see what you like best. Can I do that? Yeah. You sure? I don't want to hurt your like sensitive soul.
Jesse Reimink (25:50):
I'm not feeling that sensitive this week. So I think
Chris Bolhuis (25:52):
Good deal. Take another drink of wine and sit back and
Jesse Reimink (25:56):
Listen. Okay. I see you.
Jesse Reimink (25:58):
Let's see how it's done. Watch the master at don't.
Chris Bolhuis (26:00):
I don't have anything. I don't know what's going on. This is, I'm breaking a rule right now. I'm not, I don't have a beer while we're recording.
Jesse Reimink (26:05):
I'm just going to sit back here and watch the master at work, Chris. That's what? Okay,
Chris Bolhuis (26:08):
Here we go. Five gallon bucket dumped all the water in it. I can. Okay. And you just got done running a half a marathon. You are exhausted. You are you're dehydrated and you are thirsty. Okay. But you got that five gallon bucket sitting right in front of you with sand and water in it. I give you a straw, say, have at it, you stab the straw and that sand and you just, you can drink it. No problem. No problem at all. Okay. Now next week, same thing running half marathon. I come chuckling up to you, you know MOSY and on up. And I say, Hey, Jesse, how you doing? And you're like, oh man, I'm so thirsty. And I hand you a lump of clay. Okay? Now this clay has all the water in it. You could watch, it's got gallons of water in the clay, because it's got a really high porosity. I hand you the lump of clay and I hand you a straw. You stab the straw into the clay and you go like that. Nothing's come coming out. Cause clay is really, really porous, but it is impermeable. It will not let the water go. Okay. How'd that? Do? , what do you think?
Jesse Reimink (27:11):
That's a better one.I you like it? I'm yep. I've learned a lesson here today. That's a better one please. Never right? Never disagree with Chris Bolhuis. He is the lesson expert here.
Chris Bolhuis (27:20):
Okay.
Jesse Reimink (27:21):
All right. Okay. So we we've
Chris Bolhuis (27:23):
Covered well, hold on now, but hold on. So if you take a rock that is really porous and really permeable, Radon can move through that easily. Okay. Totally. So it can move through the soil. It can move through the sedimentary rock and it can move then into your home very easily. Okay. That's the moral of the story, right? If you have rock, that's really porous or soil, that's really porous, but imper able, then it's going to have a harder time seeping through that and getting into your house. So the geology is going to help determine what happens in your home.
Jesse Reimink (28:00):
Yeah. So let's kind of come full circle here. We've got Radon it's uranium has 238 has decayed down to 222 Radon it's produced. It's a gas. It can move now. So we're talking about pro and permeability because that has to move from the soil into your home in some way. And there's many ways for it to get into the home, but there's a time aspect to this. It does not have an infinite amount of time to move because member, we only have 3.8 days. That's the half-life. So most of the Radon that's that's produced today will be gone within about, 16 days or so around about six half lives is kind of what we think of for the time scale of going from a hundred to zero basically. So that Radon has to move quickly. So what it means is the source, the uranium source has to be pretty close to your house. If the Radons going to make it into the basement or it has to be able to move really fast from further away. And so Radons moving through the pores and the permeable rock layers and gets into your basement. But like what other factors contribute to how fast Radon moves into your house and therefore how far away from the uranium source matters?
Chris Bolhuis (29:09):
The other big thing is water. So if you have water, that's sitting in the poor space, then water's going to slow down the mobility of the radar. So really, I mean it's complicated and we're keep, we're trying our best here to keep this like simple fight a little bit. Think about it. Three variables and Radon mobility. Porosity have to be porous permeable. It has to be, you know, allow it to flow through it and dry, not a lot of water in the poor space. If you have that, then you have the potential for very mobile radar on gas. Okay. Now can I, one thing what makes the radar on? So mobile is actually the decay process and I think this is so cool and it's worth highlighting. Cause I think it's something that everybody can relate to. It's
Jesse Reimink (30:03):
True
Chris Bolhuis (30:04):
Analogy. A high powered rifle has a recoil on it. Right? You pull the trigger and it recoils back into your shoulder. Okay. The bullet is going the opposite direction. Well, that's exactly what happens with Radon 222, when it be comes unstable and it ejects this alpha particle, that's the bullet. When the radium 2 26 decays into Radon 222, it does. So by emitting very forcefully, an alpha particle,
Jesse Reimink (30:40):
Which is the bullet in this analogy, right.
Chris Bolhuis (30:42):
That's right. And the Radon 222 then is projected the opposite direction. And that's how it moves. That's isn't that cool? Like I like that's
Jesse Reimink (30:53):
It'ss on the moves. So cool. And so, you know, there are people who model these things who model these processes and actually will create like a chemical model of, the bonding environment in an Adam. So, you know, imagine a uranium Adams sitting there and it's bonded to oxygens and silica atoms. When that thing undergoes alpha recoil, it blows a massive hole in the mineral. I mean, relative to the size of the uranium, Adam, like, you know, many like 10 or 20 bonds radius are broken in this crystal lattice. So basically uranium decays to thorium and it breaks a big hole in it. Then that thorium goes to protium uranium, uranium, again, decays to thorium. It blows another hole in it. It goes from thorium to radium blows another hole radium to radar on by the time we get to radar on there's 1, 2, 3, 4 alpha decays, you have, fired a rifle into your shoulder. Four times it could get a little bit sore at that point, right? Like the mineral structures broken down. And why, why do we care about the structure, Chris?
Chris Bolhuis (31:51):
What do you mean? What, what, what do you mean
Jesse Reimink (31:54):
Radon needs a broken mineral to be able to get out of it. If uranium's locked in a mineral, a crystal lattice it can't get out. So it needs like an interconnected pathway of broken to actually get out of the crystal and into this poor space in the rock. So there's this rock structure, rock scale, and mineral scale and atomic scale processes are all linked together in creating grey on at your home. It's very cool.
Chris Bolhuis (32:20):
Yes. So it is, that's how that recoil effect then of the decay process can propel the Radon 222, that's now a very mobile gas that can propel it through a porous permeable and relatively dry soil structure or rock that that's existing there and therefore move into your home. One of the things, Jesse, this is one of the things I love about doing this podcast with you is what you bring to the table is so different than the direction that I would've gone into. Like, you know, you've obviously read papers or, or you've been exposed to this process before where it's blasting a hole in the crystal structure. I'd never or heard of that before. Like that's I learned that then just now with the rest of the listeners, by talking to you,
Jesse Reimink (33:04):
Well, first of all, it's really fun. We both, you know, building the script is very fun because we, we learn from each other. We take it very different pathways. It's very, very fun to do this. And sometimes we argue and sometimes we almost break up and then we get back together and you know, it's all, it's all very fun, but I’ll have to find this. I haven't seen it in a while, but there's a great animation that I think, would be really useful for teaching decay.
Chris Bolhuis (33:27):
I really want that animation. I'll
Jesse Reimink (33:29):
Send it to you.
Chris Bolhuis (33:30):
Absolutely. If you can find that, I want to use that. Cause I'll use that in my classes for sure. Yeah. Like I'm always looking for stuff like that. So
Jesse Reimink (33:36):
I think it's really well.
Chris Bolhuis (33:37):
We need to move on. Okay. So we can talked about the mobility. I think we're good. Are you, you agree with that? Like or you know how,
Jesse Reimink (33:43):
Yeah. Let's, I think let's transition to the house now let's focus on like, you know, the, the actual point, how's it getting it into your house. Right. And this is something that astonished me. I didn't really know this. I mean, okay. Many houses have foundations, old houses, like the one we have found a little bit cracked. It provides an easy way for air from the soil to make it into your basement. Right. But you got this basement, that's this gap, this ship
Chris Bolhuis (34:09):
In the, well, hold on. A lot of our listeners though, don't have basements, like that's kind of a Michigan thing, you know,
Jesse Reimink (34:14):
That's true. And we have a lot in Pennsylvania as well. So it doesn't matter if you have a basement or not, but base tend to be high Radon locations just because Radons 222 mass units. It's pretty dense. So it'll kind of sink down. But I didn't know that most houses, especially new houses draw only well, less than 1% of their house air comes out of the soil. The rest is circulated through the atmosphere in an old house with a cracked foundation, you can draw up to 20% of the air in your house from the soil that astonished me. I did not know for
Chris Bolhuis (34:47):
Me, I'm amazed that my house, which is pretty well built, that it would draw 1% like that would surprise me that it would draw 1%. Now my old house, I had a Michigan basement. Like I actually had parts of my basement. That was dirt. I'm telling you right now, I should have had that home measured for Radon. Like some of the problems that I have right now, like maybe my mental status is because of like, I lived at that house for about 20 years. I was sucking in some radar for sure. I guaranteed. Yeah. That house is probably inhaling 50% of, the air from the soil.
Jesse Reimink (35:27):
It's an amazing number, right? Like how much it is a lot. Yeah. How much soil air you can get into your house. I agree. 1% seems like a lot. And then you talk about 20%. Oh my God. That's amazing now. Well,
Chris Bolhuis (35:37):
You know, like even if you don't have a basement, okay, you still have footings. You have a foundation that's dug into the soil. So either way, when a home is put in a place, a hole is dug, right. And especially this is compounded when you have a basement, right? So you dig a hole and you build, you put the walls in, so on you build the home, right? And then now you have this, this area that is what, two, three feet between your walls and the hole that's dug. They have to backfill it. Well, it never really fills in the way it was when you dug it out. You know, it's not a going to be as compact as, so now you have really increased the porosity and permeability of the, all that area surrounding your crawl space or your basement.
Jesse Reimink (36:27):
That's a really good point.
Chris Bolhuis (36:28):
Then now all of that uranium that is near the wall that you, or the hole that you dug when it's near that, now it has avenue to travel through very porous and permeable, loose unconsolidated fill. And now it's in your house.
Jesse Reimink (36:45):
That's a great point in the last way that these get into your house. Even if you don't have a basement is through water, actually Radon can be dissolved in water. And then when you bring your water into your house, when you agitate that water to gas, so the gas is released. So showers, any kind of pumps, sinks, running water that is agitating, the water, the Radon can escape from the
Chris Bolhuis (37:06):
Water. However, this is usually going to be from people that have Wells,
Jesse Reimink (37:11):
Good
Chris Bolhuis (37:12):
Point where it's not like a municipal water supply that gets tested and treated and things like that. So which like I have. So again, um, I've got a well, you know, that's a really interesting thing though, when you, you know, so this water has the Radon in it and you agitate it by doing dishes and things like that. The Radon now is in the air. Yeah.
Jesse Reimink (37:32):
Sitting in your hot tub
Chris Bolhuis (37:35):
You got that.
Jesse Reimink (37:37):
You got that. So you, this last part, I think now it's in our house and you know, we, we've kind of talked a little bit about why it's dangerous, but let's just talk, there's a little, a few sort of things to tidy up here about when Ray gets into your house, right? First of all, it's heavy, it's 222 atomic mass units. Most of the air, most of the atmosphere is oxygen and nitrogen and carbon dioxide, these are all far lighter. So Radon will sink, which means it can stagnate often in your basement. And so that's where people go to measure, Radon. And, and that's where sort of the risk is, is the lower levels of your house. Typically, because that Radon will kind of sink down in your house and it's hard to get out actually, because it's so heavy. So that's the point of it.
Jesse Reimink (38:17):
The other aspect is that we we've talked about this half-life thing, it's a short half-life. So if it gets into your house, first of all, it's not going anywhere. Second of all it decays and there's a whole bunch of decays that happen. Remember Radon is only one step down from uranium to lead. So there are between seven and 10 additional steps of decay, of radioactive decay. And of those, some of them are alpha particles before it becomes lead. And so basically, you know, once you have Radon, you have a bunch of alpha decay going on this really energetic process and then it ends in lead, which is not a great element to have around and to have in your lungs. And so, you know, the main risk is inhaling the radar and then it's in your lungs and it decays down and then it's lead and you got lead in your lungs. Um, so that's kind of the dangerous aspect of it and this is why we need to get tested.
Chris Bolhuis (39:06):
Okay. So what do you do though? Like do, is it just an air circulation, solution?
Jesse Reimink (39:13):
Yeah, it's actually mostly not an, an air circulation solution. It's mostly a preventing it from getting into your house. So the, the houses I've seen in, in Pennsylvania and the house we have here has what's called a passive radar on system. So you could basically, what you need to do is you need to take a, a drill, a pipe. You talked about Chris, that boundary, that backfill boundary between the soil and your foundation. What you do is you basically put an air pipe down in there that sucks out the air from the area around your foundation. And so all it is taking that gas, that soil gas that would normally get into your house and it's just venting it up into the atmosphere. So that's all it is. And there's an active or passive system. Some of them have a fan attached to them, the active oil ones where it's actually pumping out the air.
Jesse Reimink (39:59):
Ours is a passive system and this is really kind of cool. All it does is just a pipe, a series of pipes that are, we have a basement. So it's a series of pipes running under our foundation that are taking the air out and it's passive. There's a, a pipe that goes up to the roof and whenever wind blows across that pipe, it creates low pressure and it sucks all that air out. And so any amount of wind is just sucking air out. It's, it's kind of cleansing the air around our foundation of Radon, which is just a cool, very cool thing. Very simple. It
Chris Bolhuis (40:28):
Is a very simple thing, but not if you didn't build the home with that in mind, which a lot of homes are not, what do you do then?
Jesse Reimink (40:38):
These pipes are not huge and you don't need to go all the way into the foundation. Usually they can just wrap it around the, the foundation on the sides. So it's, it can, I don't know the, how expensive it is to get these installed. Um, I think because the, like I said, the house we have, um, has it in headed in place already, but I think most modern homes will be out with this detection system or with this, um, Radon prevention system in place to get it installed. I'm not sure what the price is, but it's not ultra expensive. You know, something you need to get tested on.
Chris Bolhuis (41:08):
I'm curious, how, how did you know you have it?
Jesse Reimink (41:10):
You can see it in the walls outside and often it's running in ours, it's running inside the basement. Um, you can see some of the pipes running up
Chris Bolhuis (41:19):
You, so your basement’s unfinished then.
Jesse Reimink (41:21):
Yeah. Base's unfinished. Yep.
Chris Bolhuis (41:23):
All right. Gotcha.
Jesse Reimink (41:24):
Okay. And there's a, there's a pipe, you know, running along the side of the house that, oh, just a PVC pipe that goes up to the roof and I'm like, ah, I wonder what that is. Oh, it's a Ray down system. Okay, cool. But where I'm at Pennsylvania is a pretty high Radon risk area. In general. We have a lot of carbonate rocks, which are high in uranium. And so therefore the soils are high in uranium and there's just high uranium background where you're at in Michigan. It's a little bit different. The soil isn't as high in uranium, but you have really dry soils. So I think the that's why Michigan might be higher Radon, do you?
Chris Bolhuis (41:55):
I'm not sure. Um, so my situation is unique and I think a lot of people are in the situation I'm in, we are in clay. Okay. And, and so I'm on top of a hill, but I'm, I'm in clay. And so clay is impermeable, but it's very, very wet. So it, it, it has, it has the water that both of these things act to slow it down. However, if there's a lot of uranium on that whole wall that was dug, then you have access for it to get into your house. Um, yeah. Okay.
Jesse Reimink (42:28):
That's a good point.
Chris Bolhuis (42:29):
There are a lot of people though in our area that are in sand. So we have have these like, you know, ancient do and Sandy, you know, kind of deltaic, environments that homes are built in. And so they can have an increased problem because you know, it has its porous. It's really permeable and it's relatively dry C sand has such great drainage.
Jesse Reimink (42:50):
Yeah. And radar's just flying around through sand. So you could just flow really quickly through it. So, you know, I, I think it's important because this is a, a, a geoscience topic that is immediately societally relevant, but also has health implications. I think we should point out Chris, we'd be Remis. If we didn't point out that places you can learn more in places, you probably should learn more. If you don't know, about your home in the us, at least the environmental protection age agency, the EPA and the United States geological survey, the S G S have maps and really actually great guides that can help homeowners. But it's a very local problem. Like houses in the same neighborhood have very different Radon risk factors, basically, because some older homes, you know, depending on how the quality of your foundation, it really a lot of things matter. So getting your own specific home tested is a pretty important thing. Most other countries, I know Canada has them, Germany, the, the same sort of governmental agencies will have Radon resources that that people should look into.
Chris Bolhuis (43:51):
We'll put a couple links in the show notes like the EPA, um, Radon map. We'll put that in the show notes and so on. So if you're interested, check it out,
Jesse Reimink (43:59):
It's kind of fun to look at the radar on risk map too, of the, of the United States chef.
Chris Bolhuis (44:04):
Be careful of it though.
Jesse Reimink (44:06):
That's true
Chris Bolhuis (44:06):
By like you said, I mean you can have a neighborhood that's, you know, these you're in close proximity to people and, and very, very different radar on levels in the low levels of the house.
Jesse Reimink (44:16):
You that's a really good point. Yeah. It's it, it was sort of fun. I, I, I looked at the us map and you know, you see the big color splotches pasted over the map and then you zoom in on, on Pennsylvania, which I did. And , you know, it, it gets more detailed. Definitely. It gets more nuanced for sure at the county level and at the township level. So it it's, it's interesting to look at. Um, yeah, so I thought this was fun, Chris, and I think we should, you know, these types of things where geoscience, there's an interesting geoscience story behind a really important process that everybody should sort of be aware of a little bit.
Chris Bolhuis (44:47):
That's right. That's right. That's what this is all about.
Jesse Reimink (44:50):
Absolutely.
Chris Bolhuis (44:51):
Our amazing planet, how it all works.
Jesse Reimink (44:54):
I know. And how it impacts our everyday lives. That's it's so good. That's right
Chris Bolhuis (44:58):
Now you had a good idea. It took me a little bit, but once I started digging into it, I was sold. This was fun. I liked learning about it.
Jesse Reimink (45:03):
So we didn't almost break up over this episode. So
Chris Bolhuis (45:06):
No, we didn't. No, that's true.
Jesse Reimink (45:07):
We're we're becoming more collegial. That's right. All right, man, with that, I think that's a rep. If you enjoy planet geo share with your friends, that's by far the most important, give us a like subscribe those matter for the algorithm and follow us on all the social medias we're at planet geo cast. That's right.
Chris Bolhuis (45:22):
Cheers.
Jesse Reimink (45:23):
Cheers. Next week. See ya.
