Realistic radiation effects on things

There seem to be 3 common schools of thought on how to deal with radiation in games and fiction it seems like

1.) treat it as magic

2.) treat it as magic poison

3.) somewhat realistically portray it's deleterious effects on the health of living things but don't portray its effects on other things.


I'm eventually planning on introducing an NPC in a game I'm running who is passively just a bit below the boiling point of water and pumps out a lot of ionizing radiation. They can crank this up significantly.

They live in an exclusion zone on an island.

Though one better maintained then Pripyat or Fukushima because, instead of it being an abandoned developed area crumbling from neglect, it's a bunch of undeveloped land with a complex build for and maintained by a single person in the middle.

I try to go for a realistic portrayal of things like fire, air, water, radiation and such in my games.

So I've been searching for information on what radiation does to things and devices but haven't been finding much besides how UV rays from the sun fuck up plastics and ionizing radiation can cause digital video cameras to glitch and show artifacts.

I've found plenty on what radiation does to PEOPLE, but not their homes, clothes, and belongings, or what regular exposure (instead of one contaminating event from a bomb test or meltdown it's an unshielded reactor taking it's morning stroll through the same part of a forest, beach, or field every day for weeks, months, or years.) does to a place.

Would their wallpaper all be bleached? Would they go through a lot of clothes and bed covers? Can they own a phone, Gameboy, or PC or would they breakdown quickly?

I'm interested in this because whether the party figure out how to visit themselves, or send in a drone I want to figure out what physical signs this person would leave on their home environment and personal belongings to convey the dangerous and alienating condition of such a being.

well, i know radiation effect photographic film almost instantly.

Make them lose hair and get cancer.

...I suppose I haven't really looked into this much, but I had the strong impression that radiation just doesn't do all that much to non-living things. It damages living things because they're full of molecule-scale parts which need to be ordered in a precise way.

I have a dim recollection that radiation can screw up microelectronics-- flip bits in RAM and so forth-- but not much beyond that.

Man, I hate it when my house's hair starts falling out. It's just unsightly.

depends on the radiation, is it just xrays and shit or is he through out alpha/beta shit too?

>Would their wallpaper all be bleached? Would they go through a lot of clothes and bed covers?
prob not

>Can they own a phone, Gameboy, or PC or would they breakdown quickly?
it would get fucked

Microchips and other such really fine electronics will succumb to hard enough radiation after a while. This has caused issues both in Chernobyl and Fukushima as exploration remotes seize up. In the case of Chernobyl the roof had to be cleared of radioactive debris by humans as the robots just died straight away. Shifts were short, maybe five minuets a person, so the "biorobots" didn't drop dead there and then. I suspect most are dead by now though.

"Unshielded reactor" levels would probably make most polymers age a bit faster. But as you've seen, they age because of a lot of reasons, like UV rays, or a number of chemicals, so this might be a poor clue to what's going on. At such levels of radiation neither drone nor player would be able to interact with these nuclear people up close either, safe interaction would have you standing on either side of a few meters of shielding and shouting to each other. The environment they live in may also be worryingly radioactive due to transmutation as well.

it's worth thinking about what sort of radiation they're pumping out - if it's alpha or beta you could argue that it probably wouldn't make its way past their skin to the outside world (depending on where the actual source of the radiation is).

Aside from the stuff other posters have mentioned on robots in fukushima and chernobyl it's worth doing some research on exposures in space - beyond the earth's magnetic field cosmic radiation is one of the current technological barriers to manned spaceflight to, say, mars - and can also damage unshielded electronics.

lets assume they pump out alpha and beta particles too.

Well, we're not using realistic rules for poison or disease, so why would radiation be different?

I don't know about inanimate objects besides maybe making them degrade slightly faster than normal but if radiation levels are high enough then even the trees start to die.
This happened to the forest right beside the reactor when chernobyl blew, creating the red forest.

Are we talking about gamma radiation or ionized electromagnetic radiation?

bear in mind though that that was largely a consequence of the trees being right under one of the initial plumes, and as they were evergreens (as opposed to deciduous trees) they intercepted a lot of the initial, short lived radionuclides and consequently got a massive dose of ionising radiation

gamma rays are ionising electromagnetic radiation
em radiation can't be ionised, 'cos an ion is by definition an atom with more or less electrons than standard...

Alpha radiation will make any metal around him brittle after a while, same as hydrogen embrittlement. Can't say more than that which hasn't already been discussed, never done much with radiation damage experiments.

If you're approaching the exclusion zone from a realistic perspective you can reduce the damage to it by just saying that, unlike at Chernobyl, the designers had the sense to put the reactor in a bunker rather than a warehouse. This is common practice in nations which don't execute their scientists and would basically make the zone "a bit shit because it's near a busted reactor" rather than "totally fucked because several tons of plutonium settled in the soil".

it sucks when my toothbrush gets cancer.

Helium embrittlement? Because the radiation itself isn't going to penetrate metal for shit, so that'd be damn superficial. Neutrons can embrittle over years or decades, but the players aren't going to get to any place with that hard radiation alive.

OP isn't having an exclusion zone around reactor, read again.

>They live in an exclusion zone on an island.

>They live in an exclusion zone on an island.
>Though one better maintained then Pripyat or Fukushima because, instead of it being an abandoned developed area crumbling from neglect, it's a bunch of undeveloped land with a complex build for and maintained by a single person in the middle.

That must be it. I recalled something about the higher energy alphas managing to get in but I'm not finding any literature on the matter now so I must be misremembering.

English, please!

Computer die.
You die.
Rest fine.

Oh no, intense radiation tends to affect circuitry pretty badly. The electricity can arc between metals and burn whatever is inbetween which destroys most modern devices.

Anything containing moisture will instantly dry out so bottles will crack, paints will likely flake, fabrics will probably fray and dry up.

Anything containing animal fat will melt so perishables will go to waste pretty fast or melt.

The easiest way to summarize it is imagine something being left out in the hot sun for several years. It's all corroded and faded.

cool.

the part about things drying out sounds more like microwaves than ionizing radiation.

>what physical signs this person would leave on their home environment and personal belongings to convey the dangerous and alienating condition of such a being.

if you want them to be aliens just have them have big swollen heads, grey skin, and tiny bodies.

>damadge

I don't know if this helps or not, if you can see something glowing with radiation, you're probably dead.