Radioactive Element Quotes

Think of the elements as dangerous, radioactive, short-lived Pokémon.

To dispose first and investigate later is an invitation to disaster, for once radioactive elements have been deposited at sea they are irretrievable. The mistakes that are made now are made for all time.

It was my good fortune to be linked with Mme. Curie through twenty years of sublime and unclouded friendship. I came to admire her human grandeur to an ever growing degree. Her strength, her purity of will, her austerity toward herself, her objectivity, her incorruptible judgement— all these were of a kind seldom found joined in a single individual... The greatest scientific deed of her life—proving the existence of radioactive elements and isolating them—owes its accomplishment not merely to bold intuition but to a devotion and tenacity in execution under the most extreme hardships imaginable, such as the history of experimental science has not often witnessed.

If Newton had not, as Wordsworth put it, voyaged through strange seas of thought alone, someone else would have. If Marie Curie had not lived, we still would have discovered the radioactive elements polonium and radium. But if J. K. Rowling had not been born, we would never have known about Harry Potter. That is why Master Potter means so much to me. Science may be special but Harry, as a work of art, is more so. Harry Potter is unique.

But his laugh was a radioactive seduction and had a half-life of infinity.

radioactive elements decayed into other elements—that one day you had an atom of uranium, say, and the next you had an atom of lead. This was truly extraordinary. It was alchemy, pure and simple; no one had ever imagined that such a thing could happen naturally and spontaneously.

That line of reasoning also leads to questions—but they’re the exasperating kind. If there was a designer, why did he or she or it create all those fossils of things that aren’t living anymore? Why did the designer put all these chemical substitutions of radioactive elements in with nonradioactive elements? Why did a designer program in this continual change that we observe in the fossil record, if he or she assembled the whole system at once? In short, why mess around with all this messiness?

When scientists had discovered, at the turn of the century, that radium could destroy human tissue, it was quickly put to use to battle cancerous tumors, with remarkable results. Consequently—as a life-saving and thus, it was assumed, health-giving element—other uses had sprung up around it. All of Katherine’s life, radium had been a magnificent cure-all, treating not just cancer, but hay fever, gout, constipation…anything you could think of. Pharmacists sold radioactive dressings and pills; there were also radium clinics and spas for those who could afford them.

Because radium can be mixed with other elements to make them glow in the dark, clock makers used it to create fluorescent numbers on watch faces and hired young women to perform the delicate task of painting them. In the watch factories of New Jersey, Connecticut, and Illinois, the Radium Girls were trained to lick the tips of their brushes into a fine point before dipping them into pots of radium paint. When the jaws and skeletons of the first girls began to rot and disintegrate, their employers suggested they were suffering from syphilis. A successful lawsuit revealed that their managers had understood the risks of working with radium and get done everything they could to conceal the truth from their employees. It was the first time the public learned the hazards of ingesting radioactive material. The

Had she not been an immigrant, she might have enjoyed being a mom. 'Raising you took half my life,' she would say. 'You're living proof of where that half of my life went.' Chemists know this already. All elements on the periodic table decay. And in one half life, half the original element, called the parent nucleus, decays to a different element, for the daughter nucleus. No son nucleus, of course. No son could ever be a by-product of radioactive decay.

The missiles would be packed full of fissionable material, and fission scared her nearly as much as antimatter. It was the dirty, nasty form of nuclear energy. Shut down a fusion reactor, and the only radioactive materials left were those that had been made radioactive by neutron bombardment. Shut down a fission reactor, and you had a deadly, possibly explosive pile of unstable elements with a half-life that meant they would stay hazardous for thousands of years.

astonishment, it made the girls themselves gleam. Katherine, like many before her, was entranced by it. It wasn’t just the glow—it was radium’s all-powerful reputation. Almost from the start, the new element had been championed as “the greatest find of history.”7 When scientists had discovered, at the turn of the century, that radium could destroy human tissue, it was quickly put to use to battle cancerous tumors, with remarkable results. Consequently—as a life-saving and thus, it was assumed, health-giving element—other uses had sprung up around it. All of Katherine’s life, radium had been a magnificent cure-all, treating not just cancer, but hay fever, gout, constipation…anything you could think of. Pharmacists sold radioactive dressings and pills; there were also radium clinics and spas for those who could afford them. People hailed its coming as predicted in the Bible: “The sun of righteousness [shall] arise with healing in his wings, and ye shall go forth and gambol as calves of the stall.”8

A. There are people who collect elements. These collectors try to gather physical samples of as many of the elements as possible into periodic-table-shaped display cases.1 Of the 118 elements, 30 of them—like helium, carbon, aluminum, and iron—can be bought in pure form in local retail stores. Another few dozen can be scavenged by taking things apart (you can find tiny americium samples in smoke detectors). Others can be ordered over the Internet. All in all, it’s possible to get samples of about 80 of the elements—90, if you’re willing to take some risks with your health, safety, and arrest record. The rest are too radioactive or short-lived to collect more than a few atoms of them at once. But what if you did? The periodic table of the elements has seven rows.2 You could stack the top two rows without much trouble. The third row would burn you with fire. The fourth row would kill you with toxic smoke. The fifth row would do all that stuff PLUS give you a mild dose of radiation. The sixth row would explode violently, destroying the building in a cloud of radioactive, poisonous fire and dust. Do not build the seventh row.

It is now known that almost none of the neutron-absorbing boron mix in the sandbags made it into the core. The sandbags had, however, partially sealed the open gap between the slanted Upper Biological Shield and the reactor wall below. This was causing the fire to increase in temperature due to a reduction in heat exchange between the core and surrounding environment. The fire reached at least 2,250°C (the element ruthenium, which melts at that temperature, was detected in radioactive vapour that escaped the core), confirming that a meltdown was occurring.195 At the same time, the amount of fission products being dispersed into the atmosphere increased. Legasov’s sincere plan to save the plant, born out of a desperate need to do something, had succeeded only in making the situation worse.

Preventing a radioactive release is the highest priority at any nuclear facility, so power stations are built and operated with a safety philosophy of ‘defense in depth’. Defense in depth aims to avoid accidents by embracing a safety culture, but also accepts that mechanical (and human) failures are inevitable. Any possible problem - however unlucky - is then anticipated and factored into the design with multiple redundancies. The goal, therefore, is to provide depth to the safety systems; akin to the way Russian dolls have several layers before reaching the core doll. When one element fails, there is another, and another, and another that still functions. The first barrier are the fuel ceramic pellets themselves, followed by each fuel rod’s zirconium alloy cladding. In an ordinary modern commercial nuclear plant, the nuclear core where the fission reaction takes place would be contained inside a third barrier: an almost unbreakable metal shield enveloping the reactor, called a ‘pressure vessel’.

Bohr is really doing what the Stoic allegorists did to close the gap between their world and Homer's, or what St. Augustine did when he explained, against the evidence, the concord of the canonical scriptures. The dissonances as well as the harmonies have to be made concordant by means of some ultimate complementarity. Later biblical scholarship has sought different explanations, and more sophisticated concords; but the motive is the same, however the methods may differ. An epoch, as Einstein remarked, is the instruments of its research. Stoic physics, biblical typology, Copenhagen quantum theory, are all different, but all use concord-fictions and assert complementarities. Such fictions meet a need. They seem to do what Bacon said poetry could: 'give some show of satisfaction to the mind, wherein the nature of things doth seem to deny it.' Literary fictions ( Bacon's 'poetry') do likewise. One consequence is that they change, for the same reason that patristic allegory is not the same thing, though it may be essentially the same kind of thing, as the physicists' Principle of Complementarity. The show of satisfaction will only serve when there seems to be a degree of real compliance with reality as we, from time to time, imagine it. Thus we might imagine a constant value for the irreconcileable observations of the reason and the imagination, the one immersed in chronos, the other in kairos; but the proportions vary indeterminably. Or, when we find 'what will suffice,' the element of what I have called the paradigmatic will vary. We measure and order time with our fictions; but time seems, in reality, to be ever more diverse and less and less subject to any uniform system of measurement. Thus we think of the past in very different timescales, according to what we are doing; the time of the art-historian is different from that of the geologist, that of the football coach from the anthropologist's. There is a time of clocks, a time of radioactive carbon, a time even of linguistic change, as in lexicostatics. None of these is the same as the 'structural' or 'family' time of sociology. George Kubler in his book The Shape of Time distinguished between 'absolute' and 'systematic' age, a hierarchy of durations from that of the coral reef to that of the solar year. Our ways of filling the interval between the tick and tock must grow more difficult and more selfcritical, as well as more various; the need we continue to feel is a need of concord, and we supply it by increasingly varied concord-fictions. They change as the reality from which we, in the middest, seek a show of satisfaction, changes; because 'times change.' The fictions by which we seek to find 'what will suffice' change also. They change because we no longer live in a world with an historical tick which will certainly be consummated by a definitive tock. And among all the other changing fictions, literary fictions take their place. They find out about the changing world on our behalf; they arrange our complementarities. They do this, for some of us, perhaps better than history, perhaps better than theology, largely because they are consciously false; but the way to understand their development is to see how they are related to those other fictional systems. It is not that we are connoisseurs of chaos, but that we are surrounded by it, and equipped for coexistence with it only by our fictive powers. This may, in the absence of a supreme fiction-or the possibility of it, be a hard fate; which is why the poet of that fiction is compelled to say From this the poem springs: that we live in a place That is not our own, and much more, nor ourselves And hard it is, in spite of blazoned days.

It is a hot summer day in Tennessee in the midst of the sixth decade of this century. The girl has climbed the fence to get to the swimming hole she has visited so many summers of her life in the time before this part of the land was enclosed. She stands now at the edge of it. Her body is sticky with heat. The surface of the water moves slightly. Sunlight shimmers and dances in a green reflection that seems as she stares at it to pull her in even before her skin is wet with it. Drops of water on the infant’s head. All the body immersed for baptism. Do these images come to her as she sinks into the coolness? The washing of hands before Sunday’s midday meal. All our sins washed away. Water was once the element for purification. But at the bottom of this pool, There is no telling what is there now. This is what the girl’s father will say to her finally: corroded cans of chemical waste, some radioactive substances. That was why they put the fence there. She is not thinking of that now. The words have not yet been said, and so for her no trouble exists here. The water holds up her body. She is weightless in this fulsome element, the waves her body makes embracing her with their own benediction. Beneath her in the shadowy green, she feels the depth of the pond. In this coolness as the heat mercifully abates, her mind is set free, to dream as the water dreams.

In scale and audacity, the dam was astonishing; engineers were going to anchor a mile-long wall of concrete in bedrock at the bottom of a steep canyon in the Columbia. They would excavate 45 million cubic yards of dirt and rock, and pour 24 million tons of concrete. Among the few dams in the Northwest not built by the Corps of Engineers, the Grand Coulee was the work of the Bureau of Reclamation. When completed, it was a mile across at the top, forty-six stories high, and heralded as the biggest thing ever built by man. The dam backed up the river for 151 miles, creating a lake with 600 miles of shoreline. At the dam’s dedication in 1941, Roosevelt said Grand Coulee would open the world to people who had been beat up by the elements, abused by the rich and plagued by poor luck. But a few months after it opened, Grand Coulee became the instrument of war. Suddenly, the country needed to build sixty thousand planes a year, made of aluminum, smelted by power from Columbia River water, and it needed to build ships—big ones—from the same power source. Near the end of the war, America needed to build an atomic bomb, whose plutonium was manufactured on the banks of the Columbia. Power from the Grand Coulee was used to break uranium into radioactive subelements to produce that plutonium. By war’s end, only a handful of farms were drawing water from the Columbia’s greatest dam. True, toasters in desert homes were warming bread with Grand Coulee juice, and Washington had the cheapest electrical rates of any state in the country, but most of that power for the people was being used by Reynolds Aluminum in Longview and Alcoa in Vancouver and Kaiser Aluminum in Spokane and Tacoma.

Not only the iron on Earth, but also the iron in the entire Solar System, comes from outer space, since the temperature in the Sun is inadequate for the formation of iron. The Sun has a surface temperature of 6,000 degrees Celsius (11,000oF), and a core temperature of approximately 20 million degrees (36 million degrees Fahrenheit). Iron can only be produced in much larger stars than the Sun, where the temperature reaches a few hundred million degrees. When the amount of iron exceeds a certain level in a star, the star can no longer accommodate it, and it eventually explodes in what is called a "nova" or a "supernova." These explosions make it possible for iron to be given off into space.40 One scientific source provides the following information on this subject: There is also evidence for older supernova events: Enhanced levels of iron-60 in deep-sea sediments have been interpreted as indications that a supernova explosion occurred within 90 light-years of the sun about 5 million years ago. Iron-60 is a radioactive isotope of iron, formed in Allah's Miracles in the Qur'an 85 supernova explosions, which decays with a half life of 1.5 million years. An enhanced presence of this isotope in a geologic layer indicates the recent nucleosynthesis of elements nearby in space and their subsequent transport to the earth (perhaps as part of dust grains).41 All this shows that iron did not form on the Earth, but was carried from supernovas, and was "sent down," as stated in the verse. It is clear that this fact could not have been known in the 7th century, when the Qur'an was revealed. Nevertheless, this fact is related in the Qur'an, the word of Allah, Who encompasses all things in His infinite knowledge.

From the mountains of rubble, slag, rubbish, bones, dust, excrement that bear witness to the works and days of each passing generation, a few milligrams of radioactive mind-energy have in the course of history been extracted, and from them, only a fractional amount has been preserved. That fraction, passing from mind to mind, has the property of irradiating the rest of existence with meaning and value. Like the radioactive elements themselves, these dynamic and formative attributes of mind are extremely powerful, but evanescent: yet their half-life, as with the ancient Egyptian organization of the megamachine, may last for thousands of years.

The trick is to relate the unknown to the known. To explain density, McPhee makes references to lead and footballs. To describe radioactivity, he reassures us that we can hold on our laps, without any danger, the same amount of U-235 that comprised the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

The discovery of slow-neutron radioactivity meant that Fermi’s group had to work its way through the elements again looking for different and enhanced half-lives—which is to say, different isotopes and decay products.

It is rather remarkable that the whole apparatus of nucleosynthesis, generation of long-lived radioactive elements, and the chemical constants that determine the freezing point of water and the properties of the silicate weathering reactions have conspired to permit the operation of the silicate weathering thermostat. The ‘anthropic’ principle would state that of all possible Universes, things have worked out this way because a Universe has to have something near these characteristics in order to allow us to be here to notice such things. A less anthropic—and probably more humble—view is that we evolved to take advantage of this particular characteristic of our Universe, and that other forms of life could evolve to make use of other geochemically stabilized habitats.

Radium,” Kari replies, “thorium, uranium, platinum—all of the radioactive elements.

Since the Industrial Revolution, we have scattered soot across the planet and relentlessly stirred in radioactive elements, inconceivable mounds of plastic, pesticides, excess nitrogen and phosphorus, billions of skeletons from livestock, and enough concrete to spread a kilogram over every square metre of the Earth. Each year mining shifts three times more rock and dirt than all the world’s rivers, and humans are reconfiguring the course of evolution as we rearrange species across continents and eliminate many more.

From the stories she'd told, Shar had a very broad dating pool, which included ghosts, elemental forces, and, once, a pansexual quasar. Exhausting, she'd said. Don't date anything that has a radioactive corona.

Gold happens to have physical properties that make it suitable as a form of money. It is one of two noble, non-radioactive, non-toxic, mononuclidic metals. Mononuclidic means that there’s only one natural stable isotope of the element. The other is Rhodium, discovered in 1803 by British physician William Wollaston. Gold has a very high stock-to-flow ratio due to its monetary properties and history. This means that gold’s existing stockpile is enormous compared to the inflow of new gold onto the market. Since gold remains somewhat scarce, it can hold its value over long periods.

Some types of transmutation happen spontaneously on Earth, in the decay of radioactive elements. This was first demonstrated in 1901, by the physicists Frederick Soddy and Ernest Rutherford,

Being with Neve was like combining two radioactive elements and watching the explosion.

He credits this decision to three people: H. G. Wells, who showed Szilard “what the liberation of atomic energy on a large scale would mean”; and Frédéric and Irène Joliot-Curie, the French nuclear scientists who at about this time demonstrated that radioactivity could be created artificially and need not depend on nature’s elemental design.

neutrons. . . . Such uncharged nuclei penetrate even substances containing the heavier elements without ionization losses and cause the formation of radio-active substances.

How does one power a spacecraft that will be traveling for at least a decade on a journey so far from the Sun that our star shines there at less than a thousandth of its brightness at Earth? Solar arrays won’t work that far from the Sun, and no battery is powerful and light enough to do the job of powering a decade-long mission. But the radioactive decay of plutonium (an element that was discovered in 1940 and was named for Pluto) passively generates heat without fail—and that heat can be turned into electricity. For this reason, plutonium-fueled nuclear batteries have been the power supplies of choice for deep-space interplanetary missions to the most distant planets from the Sun.

But your genes can also be different from those of your parents just through random mutation, which is the imperfect copying from one strand of DNA to another. It can literally be a cosmic ray from outer space that knocks into one of your genes and changes it. Genes sometimes jump from one place on the DNA molecule to another. These are called transposon genes. It could be that your parent’s eggs or sperm (or a plant’s ova and pollen) got messed with a little by some chemical. It could be radiation from some radioactive elements in Earth’s crust that caused a mutation. Sometimes viruses get into the reproductive cells of an organism and modify its genes. Virus manipulation can also be exploited deliberately—to adjust the genes of corn plants so they are tolerant of aggressive weed killer, for example.

radioactive Rubidium-87, containing 37 protons (and 50 neutrons), can change or decay to strontium, which has 38 protons. These two elements can be thought of as a radiochemical system. When

Now, the next stage of transformation—the dismantling, under the protection of the arch, of the most dangerous, damaged structural elements and contaminated radioactive materials and nuclear fuel from the destroyed Unit 4, and their final burial—will begin. There are also new difficulties. Extraction of the destroyed fuel: this is an operation that has not been practiced anywhere before, and for which there are no previous examples. However, the experts working at the platform of the CNPP had sufficient time to organize this work. By all current estimates, the new confinement will ensure full safety for one hundred years.

Granite contains a number of naturally occurring substances, one of them being that much-loved radioactive element uranium. Because of this, New York’s Grand Central Station gives off more radiation than is permitted at a nuclear power station. Don’t worry if you go there though, the rules about building nuclear power stations are extremely strict, and you’re not going to come to any harm even if you lived your entire life in the station.

For the first time, he could see how this “accident” would happen. When the balloon was over the city, the explosion would be triggered remotely. There would be no huge fireball, no mushroom cloud like what the town’s residents had witnessed from their rooftops countless times. No, this detonation would be tiny by comparison but sufficient enough to crack the plutonium core and spew perhaps the most deadly element on earth across the valley below, an invisible mist spreading through the open air, poisoning thousands as they unwittingly inhaled the radioactive particles into their lungs, killing them in miserable ways over the next weeks and months and making the area uninhabitable for the rest of man’s time on earth.