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Plutonium has a half-life of 80 million years. How long will it take for a sample of plutonium to reach 1% of its initial level?

Plutonium has a half-life of 80 million years. How long will it take for a sample of plutonium to reach 1% of its initial level?

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Plutonium has a half-life of 80 million years. How long will it take for a sample of plutonium to reach 1% of its initial level?
Transcribed Image Text:Plutonium has a half-life of 80 million years. How long will it take for a sample of plutonium to reach 1% of its initial level?
Expert Solution
Concept and Principle:
  • When a nucleus becomes unstable it will undergo radioactive decay to attain a stable configuration. They do so by emitting radiation.

 

  • The rate of radioactive decay is called activity and the half-life is the time it takes for the activity to reduce by half in a radioactive sample.

 

  • Radioactive decay is exponential in nature and can be written as,

N=N0e−0.693(tt12)

Here N0 is the original number of radioactive nuclei present, t is the time, and t1/2 is the half-life of the radioactive sample. This is known as the exponential law of radioactive decay.

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