Stable Isotope - Definition of Stability, and Natural Isotopic Presence

Definition of Stability, and Natural Isotopic Presence

Most naturally occurring nuclides are stable (about 254; see list at the end of this article); and about 34 more (total of 288) are known radioactives with sufficiently long half-lives (also known) to occur "primordially." If the half-life of a nuclide is comparable to, or greater than, the Earth's age (4.5 billion years), a significant amount will have survived since the formation of the Solar System, and then is said to be primordial. It will then contribute in that way to the natural isotopic composition of a chemical element. Primordially present radioisotopes are easily detected with half-lives as short as 700 million years (e.g., 235U), although some primordial isotopes have been detected with half-lives as short as 80 million years (e.g., 244Pu). However, this is the present limit of detection, as the nuclide with the next-shortest half-life (niobium-92 with half-life 34.7 million years) has not yet been detected in nature.

Many naturally-occurring radioisotopes (another 51 or so, for a total of about 339) exhibit still shorter half-lives than 80 million years, but they are made freshly, as daughter products of decay processes of primordial nuclides (for example, radium from uranium) or from ongoing energetic reactions, such as cosmogenic nuclides produced by present bombardment of Earth by cosmic rays (for example, carbon-14 made from nitrogen).

Many isotopes that are classed as stable (i.e. no radioactivity has been observed for them) are predicted to have extremely long half-lives (sometimes as high as 1018 years or more). If the predicted half-life falls into an experimentally accessible range, such isotopes have a chance to move from the list of stable nuclides to the radioactive category, once their activity is observed. Good examples are bismuth-209 and tungsten-180 which were formerly classed as stable, but have been recently (2003) found to be alpha-active. However, such nuclides do not change their status as primordial when they are found to be radioactive.

Most stable isotopes in the earth are believed to have been formed in processes of nucleosynthesis, either in the 'Big Bang', or in generations of stars that preceded the formation of the solar system. However, some stable isotopes also show abundance variations in the earth as a result of decay from long-lived radioactive nuclides. These decay-products are termed radiogenic isotopes, in order to distinguish them from the much larger group of 'non-radiogenic' isotopes.