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A bottle of Radithor at the National Museum of Nuclear Science & History in New Mexico, United States. Radithor was a patent medicine that is a well-known example of radioactive quackery. It consisted of triple-distilled water containing at a minimum 1 microcurie (37 kBq) each of the radium-226 and 228 isotopes.
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.
They have shorter half-lives than primordial radionuclides. They arise in the decay chain of the primordial isotopes thorium-232, uranium-238, and uranium-235. Examples include the natural isotopes of polonium and radium. Cosmogenic isotopes, such as carbon-14, are present because they are continually being formed in the atmosphere due to ...
A chart or table of nuclides maps the nuclear, or radioactive, behavior of nuclides, as it distinguishes the isotopes of an element.It contrasts with a periodic table, which only maps their chemical behavior, since isotopes (nuclides that are variants of the same element) do not differ chemically to any significant degree, with the exception of hydrogen.
Radiochemistry is the chemistry of radioactive materials, where radioactive isotopes of elements are used to study the properties and chemical reactions of non-radioactive isotopes (often within radiochemistry the absence of radioactivity leads to a substance being described as being inactive as the isotopes are stable).
Such nuclides are considered to be "stable" until a decay has been observed in some fashion. For example, tellurium-123 was reported to be radioactive, but the same experimental group later retracted this report, and it presently remains observationally stable. The next group is the primordial radioactive nuclides.
A nuclide is a species of an atom with a specific number of protons and neutrons in the nucleus, for example, carbon-13 with 6 protons and 7 neutrons. The nuclide concept (referring to individual nuclear species) emphasizes nuclear properties over chemical properties, whereas the isotope concept (grouping all atoms of each element) emphasizes chemical over nuclear.
Isotopes are atoms that are of a specific element, but have different numbers of neutrons and thus different mass numbers. The ratio between isotopes of an element varies slightly in the world, so in order to study isotopic ratio changes across the world, changes in isotope ratios are defined as deviations from a standard, multiplied by 1000.