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Pardon my ignorance but How could any radioactive material whose half life is 30 year could survive billions of years on earth and still be radioactive?
by iamgopal 4y ago
Pardon my ignorance but How could any radioactive material whose half life is 30 year could survive billions of years on earth and still be radioactive?
- jerf 4y agoYou are correct. It can't. It is made: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesium-137#Uses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesium-137#Uses "As an almost purely human-made isotope, caesium-137 has been used to date wine and detect counterfeits and as a relative-dating material for assessing the age of sedimentation occurring after 1945."
- EdwardDiego 4y agoThis reminds me of a cottage industry that developed to recover iron/steel from shipwrecks that sunk before atmospheric nuclear tests began. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel
- jl6 4y agoIt hadn’t survived for billions of years, it was made of caesium-137 which was manufactured in a nuclear reactor.
- vandahm 4y agoCesium-137 is made in nuclear reactors, but some radioactive isotopes with shorter half lives (well, short compared to the age of the Earth) exist in nature because they are a product of the natural radioactive decay of other, long-lived materials like Uranium.
- Sharlin 4y agoIt took us a few hundred years, but we did finally realize the alchemists' dream of transmuting elements into other elements. It's just a little expensive.