Trace radioisotope

A trace radioisotope is a radioisotope that occurs naturally in trace amounts (i.e. extremely small). Generally speaking, trace radioisotopes have half-lives that are short in comparison with the age of the Earth, since primordial nuclides tend to occur in larger than trace amounts. Trace radioisotopes are therefore present only because they are continually produced on Earth by natural processes. Natural processes which produce trace radioisotopes include cosmic ray bombardment of stable nuclides, ordinary alpha and beta decay of the long-lived heavy nuclides, thorium-232, uranium-238, and uranium-235, spontaneous fission of uranium-238, and nuclear transmutation reactions induced by natural radioactivity, such as the production of plutonium-239[1] and uranium-236[2] from neutron capture[3] by natural uranium.

Elements

The elements that occur on Earth only in traces are listed below.

Element name	Chemical Symbol
Technetium	Tc
Promethium	Pm
Polonium	Po
Astatine	At
Radon	Rn
Francium	Fr
Radium	Ra
Actinium	Ac
Protactinium	Pa
Neptunium	Np
Plutonium	Pu

Isotopes of other elements (not exhaustive):

gollark: I kind of want smart home things, but I have no actual usecase and the maintenance burden it would add to my mess of scripts and infrastructure would likely be bad.

gollark: There are the naïve enthusiastic people who go buy consumer IoT devices and them replace then when they inevitably stop being supported, the grizzled sysadmin/developer types who have seen the horrors of modern computing and don't trust it, the mystical few who are competent enough to run their own stuff and have it work, and people who want to be/think they are that but who spend all their time recompiling the kernel on their smart fridge.

gollark: https://pics.me.me/i-work-in-it-which-is-the-reason-our-house-41514357.png

gollark: There are multiple kinds of tech enthusiast.

gollark: A lot of the time you're just doing boring drudgery integrating other already-existing things, which will soon be significantly automated I think. Sometimes you actually need to spend time thinking about clever algorithms to do a thing, or how to make your thing go faster, or why your code mysteriously doesn't work, which is harder.

References

Curtis, David; Fabryka-Martin, June; Paul, Dixon; Cramer, Jan (1999). "Nature's uncommon elements: plutonium and technetium". Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta. 63 (2): 275–285. Bibcode:1999GeCoA..63..275C. doi:10.1016/S0016-7037(98)00282-8.
"Archived copy" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2011-07-22. Retrieved 2009-08-28.CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
Wilcken, K.~M.; Barrows, T. T.; Fifield, L. K.; Tims, S. G.; Steier, P. (June 2007). "AMS of natural ²³⁶ U and ²³⁹Pu produced in uranium ores". Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research B. 259 (1): 727–732. Bibcode:2007NIMPB.259..727W. doi:10.1016/j.nimb.2007.01.210.

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[Cigar-1] Curtis, David; Fabryka-Martin, June; Paul, Dixon; Cramer, Jan (1999). "Nature's uncommon elements: plutonium and technetium". Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta. 63 (2): 275–285. Bibcode:1999GeCoA..63..275C. doi:10.1016/S0016-7037(98)00282-8.

[2] "Archived copy" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2011-07-22. Retrieved 2009-08-28.CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)

[3] Wilcken, K.~M.; Barrows, T. T.; Fifield, L. K.; Tims, S. G.; Steier, P. (June 2007). "AMS of natural ²³⁶ U and ²³⁹Pu produced in uranium ores". Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research B. 259 (1): 727–732. Bibcode:2007NIMPB.259..727W. doi:10.1016/j.nimb.2007.01.210.