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Potassium-40 (40 K) is a radioactive isotope of potassium which has a long half-life of 1.25 billion years. It makes up about 0.012% (120 ppm ) of the total amount of potassium found in nature. Potassium-40 undergoes three types of radioactive decay .
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.
All other potassium isotopes have half-lives under a day, most under a minute. The least stable is 31 K, a three-proton emitter discovered in 2019; its half-life was measured to be shorter than 10 picoseconds. [5] [6] Stable potassium isotopes have been used for several nutrient cycling studies since potassium is a macronutrient required for ...
One of the primordial nuclides is tantalum-180m, which is predicted to have a half-life in excess of 10 15 years, but has never been observed to decay. The even-longer half-life of 2.2 × 10 24 years of tellurium-128 was measured by a unique method of detecting its radiogenic daughter xenon-128 and is the longest known experimentally measured ...
Conversely, of the 251 known stable nuclides, only five have both an odd number of protons and odd number of neutrons: hydrogen-2 , lithium-6, boron-10, nitrogen-14, and tantalum-180m. Also, only four naturally occurring, radioactive odd–odd nuclides have a half-life >10 9 years: potassium-40, vanadium-50, lanthanum-138, and lutetium-176.
The major natural source of radioactivity in plant tissue is potassium: 0.0117% of the naturally occurring potassium is the unstable isotope potassium-40. This isotope decays with a half-life of about 1.25 billion years (4×10 16 seconds), and therefore the radioactivity of natural potassium is about 31 becquerel/gram (Bq/g), meaning that, in ...
Naturally occurring 40 K has a half-life of 1.250 × 10 9 years. It decays to stable 40 Ar by electron capture or positron emission (11.2%) or to stable 40 Ca by beta decay (88.8%). [30] The decay of 40 K to 40 Ar is the basis of a common method for dating rocks.
Carnotite is a potassium uranium vanadate radioactive mineral with chemical formula K 2 (U O 2) 2 (VO 4) 2 ·3H 2 O. The water content can vary and small amounts of calcium , barium , magnesium , iron , and sodium are often present.