2 ms·
To be fair, it has had several decades to decay, and the most dangerous radionuclides are the ones with short half-lives and thus high output. It's pretty amaz
by CydeWeys 7y ago
To be fair, it has had several decades to decay, and the most dangerous radionuclides are the ones with short half-lives and thus high output. It's pretty amazing that it's still that dangerous given it's had over 30 years to decay.
- mikeash 7y agoAnd it’s really tiny. Lots of serious poisons would be harmless at that dose.
- andai 7y agoNoob question, if it decays so quickly, how come there's so much of it around this late in the Earth's history? Or was it created only decades ago, by artificial means?
- jellicle 7y agoSome things decay quickly and some very slowly, forming a sort of chain where the events might happen fast-slow-fast-fast-superfast-superslow-slow-fast-medium-fast-slow, or something like that. So these fast-decaying things disappear quickly but are also being constantly created by things spontaneously decaying into them. The point of a nuclear reactor is to increase the overall rates of decay, so you end up with disproportionately large amounts of the short-lived isotopes as opposed to what you would find in nature. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decay_chain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decay_chain If you scroll down you see thorium series, neptunium series, uranium series, and so on. You can see the half-life at each step.
- CydeWeys 7y agoThe short answer is, we created it. The half-life of Uranium 235 is 700 million years, so there's plenty of it around. When you bring a bunch of U235 together and cause it to undergo fission, it creates a bunch of the shorter-lived stuff as a decay product. Especially when a reactor melts down; you get a lot more of the stuff you didn't want, in a much more uncontrolled manner.