Arsenic-76

Good source for info. re: isotopes

Submitted by HotCaviar (not verified) on Wed, 2011-05-18 23:06.

Any radionuclide generated through human created sources that is outside of its originally intended containment is concerning and requires decisive appropriate action in the face of its release.

Here is a good source for info. re: isotopes:
http://www.periodictable.com/Elements/StableAndRadioactive/index.html

~Off my menu: All Seafoods because the oceans really are a military and industrial sewer! Yes, I will miss Anchovies on my pizza, fishsticks, red snapper, tuna (even 'chicken of the sea' is no longer 'worthy,'crab, fake crab (made with Pollock, an ocean fish), clam chowder, Nori Seaweed,Caviar etc... See: http://pstuph.wordpress.com/2011/04/01/can-ocean-currents-transport-radi...
http://www.nuc.berkeley.edu/node/3486
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Shouldn't mean much to the US

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Wed, 2011-05-18 17:25.

With a half-life of 1.0778 days, it will never make it to the
US.

LOL.....

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Wed, 2011-05-18 19:27.

Guess there's a silver lining :-)

Wonder if it has any "partner" isotopes that are normally found with it that are more dastardly.

Here's some info on As-76:

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Thu, 2011-05-19 13:23.

Here's some info on As-76:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/entities/isotopes/arsenic_76/f6/8c/mu/

http://periodictable.com/Isotopes/032.76/index.p.full.dm.html

Looks like it produces daughters of Selenium-76 and Germanium-76 and ultimately ends it's life as stable Se-76

In the meantime it has spawned Ge-76
According to Wikipedia (I know, I know)"

"76Ge is very slightly radioactive, decaying by double beta decay with a half-life of 1.78 × 1021 years [1] (130 million million times the age of the universe), giving it the distinction of being the nuclide with the longest directly measured half life."

Ge-76

Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 2012-05-10 01:28.

But if you read the Wolframalpha stuff properly and ignore Wikipedia (you should know better!), you'll see that Ge-76 is only produced every 0.0002% of disintegrations, so hardly worthy of note. Every other disintegration decays to stable Se-76.

EXACTLY!!!

Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 2012-05-10 07:31.

The yield of Ge-76 is trivially small.

Additionally, the reason it has a half-life on the order of E21 years is because it is so slow to decay. People have to remember that the radioactivity, the decay rate is INVERSELY proportional to the half-life.

Radionuclides with short half-lives decay fast, and hence have high radioactivity. But in doing so, they "burn out" in a short time.

Radionuclides that have extremely long half-lives, don't decay very often, and hence the radioactivity level is low. Witness Potassium-40 ( K-40 ). It has a few billion year half-life, and all of us have K-40 in our tissues. Always have, and always will.