Talk:Stable isotope

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[edit] Abundance

How many stable isotopes are there? what percentage of all mass do they take up in:

  • earth
  • the sun
  • the universe?

cheers, mastodon 23:45, 29 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Merge discussion

  • Support; the reader would benefit if the content were merged. The resulting article would still be fairly short. Walter Siegmund (talk) 18:50, 26 July 2006 (UTC)
  • Agreed I would much prefer the list to be part of this page, where I would expect to find it if I was afetr information about stable isotopes. I doubt that many users would start by searching for List of.... Emeraude 09:20, 22 October 2006 (UTC)
  • Support List of stable isotopes should be placed in this article, rather than the other way around. shoy 22:21, 9 November 2006 (UTC)
  • Neutral Not a particularly terrible list to have around. Both the list an article are fairly short, and the article can be expanded upon. I don't see any particular reason to merge. i kan reed 20:49, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Applications

It seems that the stable isotopes of C,H,O,N, and maybe a few others (S?) have so many useful applications, from determining the source of the carbon in the testosterone in Floyd Landis's bloodstream, to the water use efficiency of plants... that there is room for content on these subjects separate from the list of all known stable isotopes.

Anyone up to the challenge of writing about it all?

—The preceding unsigned comment was added by 71.124.76.137 (talk • contribs) 01:15, 3 August 2006.

Topic merged.

203.89.172.185 22:45, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Group of Stable Isotopes

Removed pointless table. The formatting was off - Be, F, ... appeared under the zero heading (or halfway between it and one). Is this just a bit of counting WP:OR? It will need some justification (double meaning there) if it is to be included. Vsmith 15:09, 16 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Xenon

Xenon has only 7 stable isotopes.
Xenon-136 is unstable.

please fix the list it ! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 203.59.106.58 (talk) 08:32, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

Not yet. Only lower limit on half-life exists. All 9 naturally occurring isotopes of Xe are not observed to be radioactive. --V1adis1av 14:17, 18 September 2007 (UTC)

You right, sorry. anyway....

Xenon-124 is missing from the list !!!!!

also Tantalum-180-m like Bismuth-209 , it's considered unstable. it's still on the list ??? !!! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 124.169.191.228 (talk) 00:18, 22 September 2007 (UTC)

You are right, Xe-124 was missing. However, Ta-180m was NOT ever observed to be radioactive, only lower limits on its half life were set (technically, it can decay by four different ways: alpha, beta-minus, beta-plus and isomeric transition). So it should remain in the list until its radioactivity would be found in an experiment - I hope it will happen one day. --V1adis1av 18:54, 22 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Missing Isotopes

Isotopes that I noticed were missing: Chromium-50, Germanium-76, Selenium-82, Krypton-78, Molybdenum-100, Cadmium-116, Tellurium-120, Tellurium-128, Barium-130, Cerium-136, Cerium-142, Neodymium-150, Europium-151, Tungsten-180, Osmium-184, Mercury-196, Bismuth-209

Not sure about the following since in the CRC it mentions isomers: Cadmium-113, Tellurium-125, Lead-204

Istopes that need to be removed: Tellurium-123 and Tantalum-180m

I used the CRC and a comparison to the Mad_Chemist list to look for differences otherwise there is no way I would have gone throught the whole list. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.67.42.147 (talk) 16:54, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

Among the naturally occurring (stable and long-lived) nuclides:
  • 48-Ca, 76-Ge, 82-Se, 96-Zr, 100-Mo, 116-Cd, 128-Te, 130-Te, 130-Ba, 144-Nd, and 150-Nd are double beta (2b) active;
  • 151-Eu and 180-W are alpha active;
  • 123-Te, 142-Ce, 156-Dy, 149-Sm, 192-Os, and 204-Pb are not radioactive (claims on registration of radioactivity were later carefully checked and "closed", as, for example, for 123-Te). For their half lives, only lower limits are known. So them should be considered as stable, for the current experimental sensitivity.
  • 180-Ta ground state is short-lived (8.125 h) and its excited state is (meta)stable with only lower limit on the half-live known (>1e15 yr).
Let me give a list of 31 nuclides that are known to be radioactive with half-life >7E8 yr (i.e. primordial radioactive nuclides) as for today (decay modes: alpha (a), beta (b), double beta (2b), spontaneous fusion (SF), cluster emission(CE)):
40-K (b), 48-Ca (2b), 50-V (b), 76-Ge (2b), 82-Se (2b), 87-Rb (b), 96-Zr (2b), 100-Mo (2b), 113-Cd (b), 116-Cd (2b), 115-In (b), 128-Te (2b), 130-Te (2b), 130-Ba (2b), 138-La (b), 144-Nd (a), 150-Nd (2b), 147-Sm (a), 148-Sm (a), 151-Eu (a), 152-Gd (a), 176-Lu (b), 174-Hf (a), 180-W (a), 187-Re (b), 186-Os (a), 190-Pt (a), 209-Bi (a), 232-Th (a, SF), 235-U (a, CE), 238-U (a, 2b, SF).
The sources like CRC and Mad_Chemist can be out of date because many of the above-mentioned nuclides were found to be radioactive only during the last decade (for example, observation of Eu-151 alpha decay was published in 2007). For some nuclides, the lower limits established for half-lives were cited in some sources as positive results (i.e. the claims that a decay was not found and its half-life is longer than ... were understood as the half-life is equal to ...).
You are right about 50-Cr, 78-Kr, 136-Ce, 142-Ce, 196-Hg -- they have to be added to the list of stable nuclides. All of them were predicted to be double beta active (with very long half-lives) but their radioactivity was never observed. --V1adis1av (talk) 00:03, 21 February 2008 (UTC)
According to Isotopes of lead, 204-Pb is stable, too. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 129.70.15.202 (talk) 20:00, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Differences to reference

I have compared the current article list [1] to the current content of the article reference WWW Table of Radioactive Isotopes.. I just report the differences here without evaluating them, which I haven't done any research for. The article has 9 entries not in the reference:

Chromium-50, Zinc-70, Tellurium-123, Xenon-124, Xenon-136, Cerium-142, Tantalum-180m, Tungsten-183, Tungsten-184.

The reference has 8 stable entries not in the article:

76Ge, 116Cd, 120Te, 125Te, 130Ba, 151Eu, 180W, 209Bi.

PrimeHunter (talk) 00:17, 12 April 2008 (UTC)