Tungsten alloy shielding for radiation breeding equipment, as a nuclear shielding material for radiation breeding equipment, is widely used in the field of agricultural sciences. Radiation breeding is a sub class of mutation breeding has risen in recent years, it artificially use a variety of rays(such as X-rays, γ rays, ultraviolet ray,beta, neutron and laser, etc) to irradiate seeds, plants or some organs and tissues of the crops(such as pollen grain, root, bulb) to induce heritable variation, and then breed new varieties of crops with the valuable variants.

Radiation breeding was discovered in the 1920s when Lewis Stadler of the University of Missouri used X-rays on maize and barley and then was confirmed in 1928. In barley example, the resulting plants were pale yellow, yellow, white and some had white stripes. During the period 1930-2004, gamma rays were applied to develop 64% of the radiation-induced mutational varieties, followed by X-rays. Radiation breeding may occur in atomic gardens; and seeds have been sent into orbit in order to receive more cosmic radiation.

Radiation breeding plays an important role in nuclear agricultural science since it can raise breeding productivity and promote agricultural production. The use of radiation breeding techniques makes the mutation rate of crops increased by hundreds even thousands of times, and produces different types of mutational varieties to generate more new varieties. Though radiation breeding improves the crop output, it also poses a radiation threat to human. For example, X-rays can enter into human body to inhibit, damage and even kill human cells, resulting in varying degrees of changes in body physiology, pathology and biochemical aspects; γ-ray can interact with the human cells, disturbing the normal chemical processes in the human body. Therefore, breeders should use tungsten alloy radiation shielding to protect themselves from radiation damage when use a radiation breeding equipment.

Tungsten alloy shielding for radiation breeding equipment has great shielding performance due to the high density of tungsten alloy. Moreover, tungsten alloy is more environmentally friendly than lead, so it would not pollute the environment.