Wonder Women of Science by Tiera Fletcher

Author:Tiera Fletcher [Fletcher, Tiera; Rue, Ginger]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781536218282
Publisher: Candlewick Press
Published: 2021-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Robinson Snowden insists that her real discovery was more about herself than about nuclear disarmament. When she decided to continue her STEM education in graduate school, her school offered three specialties in nuclear engineering: fission, fusion, or nuclear science and technology. (What’s the diff? See page 102.) Mareena chose fusion. However, during her first semester, she kept hearing on the news about the nuclear program in Iran. “Negotiations between our country and Iran had started years before, and the people on the news were talking about noncompliance,” Robinson Snowden explains. “I had never thought much about nuclear weapons, but I knew there was a course about nuclear nonproliferation being offered, so because of the news, I was kind of interested. I enrolled in the course, and pretty soon, I was so engrossed in the topic that I changed my research focus to monitoring nuclear warheads by the radiation they emit. The fuel that drives a nuclear explosion is radioactive—these warheads emit their own radiation. So it’s an energy question: How energetic is this radiation? You can use the energy of the gamma ray to see how it was generated and also from what materials it was generated.”

Even if you haven’t studied radiation, you probably know that it exists all over the place and in many forms. Your sunblock protects you from ultraviolet radiation; your microwave cooks your food using radiation (hence the slang “nuking” your food). But most people aren’t terrified of walking outside or zapping a pizza. That’s because not all radiation is created equal. Radiation actually comes in seven different frequencies: radio waves, microwaves, infrared radiation, visible light, ultraviolet radiation, X-rays, and gamma rays. Some of these waves are dangerous, and some are relatively harmless. It all depends on where the frequencies fall on the radiation spectrum.

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