Radioactive substances exist because some things are unstable.
Imagine that you have a Jenga tower that’s been played with a lot. This is unstable and because of breezes or table vibrations sometimes even without touching it it can fall down.
In some atomic nuclei the energy levels are unstable and in physics things want to be stable. So randomly they can ‘collapse’ in a form which is losing some of that energy as radiation.
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