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Worldwide Effects of Nuclear War: Some Perspectives
Contents:
Note 4: Nuclear Half-Life
The concept of "half-life" is basic to an understanding of radioactive decay of unstable nuclei.
Unlike physical "systems"—bacteria, animals, men and stars—unstable isotopes do not individually have a predictable life span. There is no way of forecasting when a single unstable nucleus will decay.
Nevertheless, it is possible to get around the random behavior of an individual nucleus by dealing statistically with large numbers of nuclei of a particular radioactive isotope. In the case of thorium-232, for example, radioactive decay proceeds so slowly that 14 billion years must elapse before one-half of an initial quantity decayed to a more stable configuration. Thus the half-life of this isotope is 14 billion years. After the elapse of second half-life (another 14 billion years), only one-fourth of the original quantity of thorium-232 would remain, one eighth after the third half-life, and so on.
Most manmade radioactive isotopes have much shorter half-lives, ranging from seconds or days up to thousands of years. Plutonium-239 (a manmade isotope) has a half-life of 24,000 years.
For the most common uranium isotope, U-238, the half-life is 4.5 billion years, about the age of the solar system. The much scarcer, fissionable isotope of uranium, U-235, has a half-life of 700 million years, indicating that its present abundance is only about 1 percent of the amount present when the solar system was born.
Contents:
Chicago: U.s. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, "Note 4: Nuclear Half-Life," Worldwide Effects of Nuclear War: Some Perspectives, ed. Darwin, Francis, Sir, 1848-1925 and Seward, A. C. (Albert Charles), 1863-1941 and trans. Miall, Bernard in Worldwide Effects of Nuclear War: Some Perspectives Original Sources, accessed March 23, 2025, http://www.originalsources.com/Document.aspx?DocID=5MMIXFPC8V7R9HG.
MLA: U.s. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. "Note 4: Nuclear Half-Life." Worldwide Effects of Nuclear War: Some Perspectives, edited by Darwin, Francis, Sir, 1848-1925 and Seward, A. C. (Albert Charles), 1863-1941, and translated by Miall, Bernard, in Worldwide Effects of Nuclear War: Some Perspectives, Original Sources. 23 Mar. 2025. http://www.originalsources.com/Document.aspx?DocID=5MMIXFPC8V7R9HG.
Harvard: U.s. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, 'Note 4: Nuclear Half-Life' in Worldwide Effects of Nuclear War: Some Perspectives, ed. and trans. . cited in , Worldwide Effects of Nuclear War: Some Perspectives. Original Sources, retrieved 23 March 2025, from http://www.originalsources.com/Document.aspx?DocID=5MMIXFPC8V7R9HG.
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