What's the difference between radioactive materials and nuclear radiation?

I know nuclear radiation is alpha and beta particles and neutron emmision and gamma rays... but what are examples of radioactive materials? uranium-92? and what are their uses? How do radioactive materials form?What's the difference between radioactive materials and nuclear radiation?
Radium was the first radioactive element studied. The Curies, Marie mainly, did that. Anything that is element 84 or higher on the periodic table, is radioactive with varying half-lives for isotopes of the given element.



How do radioactive materials form? Easy, the stars make them. When a star explodes, it releases such elements. Stars run on nuclear fusion where lighter elements are combined to form heavier ones. That includes uranium.



Uranium is the highest naturally occuring radioactive element. Elements 93 and higher are all made by bombarding uranium with neutrons to get Neptunium, then Plutonium, bombard plutonium with neutrons...etc. Elements 93 and above all are man made in the laboratory.



Element 86, radon is radioactive and causes lung cancer if the concentration of it gets too high. Elements 84, polonium, is used to make ionizers to dissipate static electricity. It was also recently used to poison a Russian agent as well!



The biggest use for uranium and plutonium are power plants--electricity. Of course another bad use of them is for nuclear weapons.



All sorts of radioactive elements are used in medicine. If you have a radioactive source, then you can put other elements close to it and it will "make" radioisotopes. Nuclear medicine uses such radioisotopes. For example, Iodine-131 is used to see the uptake of iodine in your thyroid gland.



A transuranium element, Americium, was first detected in the 1950s when we shot off a hydrogen bomb and observed it in the fallout. It is used in smoke detectors (yes, the ones in your home) to ionize particles in air so smoke can be detected. Of course the amount of it in the smoke detector is on the order of a femto curie (1E-15 or 0.000000000000001), so it ain't that much. However, you should recycle smoke detectors because of this fact.



Hopefully that will give you a broad view of what radioactive materials are and how they are used.



Radiation is what is given off by a radioactive material as you stated below your question.