Radioactive isotopes half-lives

The nature of the radioactive decay is characteristic of the element it can be used to fingerprint die substance. Decay continues until bodi die original element and its daughter isotopes are non-radioactive. The half-life, i.e. die time taken for half of an element s atoms to become non-radioactive, varies from millions of years for some elements to fractions of a second for odiers. 

Isotope Half-life Source of radioactive isotope... 

ISOTOPES There are 30 isotopes of rubidium, ranging from Rb-75 to Rb-98. Rb-85 is the only stable form of rubidium and constitutes 72.17% of all rubidium isotopes found in the Earth s crust. Rb-87 is radioactive (a half-life of 4.9x10 ° years) and makes up about 27.83% of the remainder of rubidium found in the Earth s crust. All the other 28 isotopes make up a tiny fraction of all the rubidium found on Earth and are radioactive with very short half-lives. 

Mother isotope Abundance of mother isotope % Half life tl/2/ Radioactive decay Stable radiogene daughter nuclide Abundance of daughter isotope % Preferable application fields in geochronology... 

Lanthanum-138 is very rare and is radioactive. Its half life is about 100 billion years. The half life of a radioactive element is the time it takes for half of a sample of the element to break down. Only 5 grams of a 10-gram sample of lanthanum-138 will remain after 100 billion years. The other 5 grams would have broken down to form a new isotope. 

Technetium is an artificial element obtained by the radioactive decay of molybdenum. Element 43, named technetium in 1947, had been discovered in 1937 by Carlo Perrier and Emilio Segre in a sample obtained from the Berkely Radiation Laboratory (now Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) in California (Perrier and Segre 1937, 1947). By bombarding a molybdenum strip with 8-MeV deuterons in a 37-in. cyclotron, a radioactive molybdenum species (half-life, 65 h) had been obtained which decayed by yff-emission to a short-lived isotope (half-life, 6 h) with novel properties, identified as technetium-99m (Segre and Seaborg 1938). 

The steam produced by the nuclear core is, of course, radioactive. The radioactivity is primarily N16, a very short-lived isotope (half-life of 7 s) so that the radioactivity of the steam exists from the reactor vessel only during power generation. Carryover of long-lived radioactive particles by the steam supply to the turbine and condensate system is virtually nonexistent. 

Seventeen isotopes of potassium are known. Ordinary potassium is composed of three isotopes, one of which is 40oK (0.0118%), a radioactive isotope with a half-life of 1.28 x IO9 years. 

Natural vanadium is a mixture of two isotopes, 50V (0.24%) and 51V (99.76%). 50V is slightly radioactive, having a half-life of > 3.9 x 10i7 years. Nine other unstable isotopes are recognized. 

An important characteristic property of a radioactive isotope is its half-life, fj/2, which is the amount of time required for half of the radioactive atoms to disintegrate. For first-order kinetics the half-life is independent of concentration and is given as... 

Equations 13.31 and 13.32 are only valid if the radioactive element in the tracer has a half-life that is considerably longer than the time needed to conduct the analysis. If this is not the case, then the decrease in activity is due both to the effect of dilution and the natural decrease in the isotope s activity. Some common radioactive isotopes for use in isotope dilution are listed in Table 13.1. 

Each of the elements has a number of isotopes (2,4), all radioactive and some of which can be obtained in isotopicaHy pure form. More than 200 in number and mosdy synthetic in origin, they are produced by neutron or charged-particle induced transmutations (2,4). The known radioactive isotopes are distributed among the 15 elements approximately as follows actinium and thorium, 25 each protactinium, 20 uranium, neptunium, plutonium, americium, curium, californium, einsteinium, and fermium, 15 each herkelium, mendelevium, nobehum, and lawrencium, 10 each. There is frequently a need for values to be assigned for the atomic weights of the actinide elements. Any precise experimental work would require a value for the isotope or isotopic mixture being used, but where there is a purely formal demand for atomic weights, mass numbers that are chosen on the basis of half-life and availabiUty have customarily been used. A Hst of these is provided in Table 1. 

Radiocarbon dating (43) has probably gained the widest general recognition (see Radioisotopes). Developed in the late 1940s, it depends on the formation of the radioactive isotope and its decay, with a half-life of 5730 yr. After forms in the upper stratosphere through nuclear reactions of... 

Radon is the heaviest of the hehum-group elements and the heaviest of the normal gaseous elements. It is strongly radioactive. The most common isotope, Rn, has a half-life of 3.825 days (49). Radon s scarcity and radioactivity have severely limited the examination of its physical properties, and the values given ki Table 3 are much more uncertain than are the values Hsted for the other elements. 

Krypton and Xenon from Huclear Power Plants. Both xenon and krypton are products of the fission of uranium and plutonium. These gases are present in the spent fuel rods from nuclear power plants in the ratio 1 Kr 4 Xe. Recovered krypton contains ca 6% of the radioactive isotope Kr-85, with a 10.7 year half-life, but all radioactive xenon isotopes have short half-Hves. 

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