{"id":475,"date":"2008-04-16T22:04:08","date_gmt":"2008-04-17T05:04:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/?p=475"},"modified":"2008-04-16T22:10:30","modified_gmt":"2008-04-17T05:10:30","slug":"my-experiences-with-radioactive-elements","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/?p=475","title":{"rendered":"My Experiences with Radioactive Elements"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve recently been reading about the elements, and particularly about the rarer ones. Radioactive elements tend to be among the rarer ones on earth. In my life, not counting glow-in-the-dark radium dials\/paint, radon emissions from e.g. granite, or other household traces of radioisotopes<\/a>, I’ve had two interesting encounters with radioactive elements.<\/p>\n

The first time I met a radioactive element was in high school, as part of my physics class. Of course we studied radioactivity, α-, β- and γ-decay; used a cloud chamber, etc. According to my teacher, the element we used was protactinium. I’m wondering now whether it really was. Protactinium is extremely rare, and as I understand it, basically occurs in uranium ore as a daughter product of a radioactive decay chain. Theodore Gray<\/a>, well-known element collector and purveyor of fine posters, says:<\/p>\n

“Astatine, francium, actinium, and protactinium are irritating to element collectors. … The problem is that astatine, francium, actinium, and protactinium are absolutely impossible to collect in any meaningful sense of the word. They are so fantastically radioactive and short-lived that if you had a visible quantity of any of them, you would be dead and then it would vanish before your body was cold.”<\/p>\n

On the other hand, wikipedia<\/a> says that 231-Pa has a half-life of 32760 years, and:<\/p>\n

“In 1961, the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority was able to produce 125 g of 99.9% pure protactinium, processing 60 tons of waste material in a 12-stage process and spending 500,000 USD. For many years, this was the world’s only supply of the element. It is reported that the metal was sold to laboratories for a cost of 2,800 USD \/ g in the following years.”<\/p>\n

It is therefore perhaps plausible that a fraction of a gram of 231-Pa made its way to my high school for use in physics class.<\/p>\n

The next time I met a radioactive element was in first-year physics at university. I think the element this time was uranium 238, a relatively common element of the radioactive ones. And the application was a cool one: we repeated Ernest Rutherford’s experiment<\/a> firing α-particles through gold foil and thus debunking the “plum-pudding” model of atomic structure.<\/p>\n

The rest of my first year physics practicals were to do with gyroscopes and various kinds of electronics, and after the first year, physics was no longer on my syllabus – it was all computer science, all the time. So I haven’t played with any radioactive substances since then.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve recently been reading about the elements, and particularly about the rarer ones. Radioactive elements tend to be among the rarer ones on earth. In my life, not counting glow-in-the-dark radium dials\/paint, radon emissions from e.g. granite, or other household traces of radioisotopes, I’ve had two interesting encounters with radioactive…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-475","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/475","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=475"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/475\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=475"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=475"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=475"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}