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This is a list of radioactive nuclides (sometimes also called isotopes), ordered by half-life from shortest to longest, in seconds, minutes, hours, days and years. Current methods make it difficult to measure half-lives between approximately 10 −19 and 10 −10 seconds.
The high short-term radioactivity of spent nuclear fuel is primarily from fission products with short half-life.The radioactivity in the fission product mixture is mostly due to short-lived isotopes such as 131 I and 140 Ba, after about four months 141 Ce, 95 Zr/ 95 Nb and 89 Sr constitute the largest contributors, while after about two or three years the largest share is taken by 144 Ce/ 144 ...
Bismuth-209 was long thought to have the heaviest stable nucleus of any element, but in 2003, a research team at the Institut d’Astrophysique Spatiale in Orsay, France, discovered that 209 Bi undergoes alpha decay with a half-life of 20.1 exayears (2.01×10 19, or 20.1 quintillion years), [3] [4] over 10 9 times longer than the estimated age of the universe. [5]
At least 3,300 nuclides have been experimentally characterized [1] (see List of radioactive nuclides by half-life for the nuclides with decay half-lives less than one hour). A nuclide is defined conventionally as an experimentally examined bound collection of protons and neutrons that either is stable or has an observed decay mode .
107 Pd is the only long-living radioactive isotope among the fission products and its beta decay has a long half life and low energy, this allows industrial use of extracted palladium without isotope separation. [9] Palladium-109 will most likely have decayed to stable silver-109 by the time reprocessing happens.
The tables of elements are sorted in order of decreasing number of nuclides associated with each element. (For a list sorted entirely in terms of half-lives of nuclides, with mixing of elements, see List of nuclides.) Stable and unstable (marked decays) nuclides are given, with symbols for unstable (radioactive) nuclides in italics. Note that ...
The longest-lived nuclides are also predicted to lie on the beta-stability line, for beta decay is predicted to compete with the other decay modes near the predicted center of the island, especially for isotopes of elements 111–115. Unlike other decay modes predicted for these nuclides, beta decay does not change the mass number.
^^ Bismuth-209 was long believed to be stable, due to its half-life of 2.01×10 19 years, which is more than a billion times the age of the universe. § Europium-151 and samarium-147 are primordial nuclides with very long half-lives of 4.62×10 18 years and 1.066×10 11 years, respectively.