100 Picocuries - That's a Lot! (Or is it?)

Since most Americans have no idea what danger might lurk in a glass of water with 200 picocuries per liter, we are at the mercy of those who might use this lack of knowledge to their political advantage.

Imagine sitting in a chair three feet away from a gram of an unknown radioactive metal, about the size of a penny, on the floor in front of you. Should you be concerned? I know I would be - at least until I knew more about what it was. Obviously we would be interested in what type of radiation was being emitted. It if were alpha or beta particles, there would be no problem as the 3 feet of air would stop any significant amount. But what if it were gamma rays? Then we would want to know just how "active" the source was - with the activity of a radioactive source being measured in the number of atoms that disintegrate every second.

Let's suppose our one gram of material is radium, specifically 226Ra. Would you care to guess the number of disintegrations per second? A mere 37,000,000,000 (37 billion)! This, by the way, is the number of disintegrations defined as 1 curie, or 1 Ci, since the curie is defined as the activity of one gram of radium. You needn't run away, but you might not want to hang around. If it were one gram of cesium 134, a quick exit would be advisable. [Cesium 134 is a gamma and beta emitter that has about fifteen times the activity of the Goian cesium 137, which is only a beta emitter.]

The curie, a United States (USA) unit, is still in common use but is gradually being replaced by the International Standard (SI) becquerel or Bq, which is defined as one disintegration per second. Obviously, then, 1 curie is equal to 37 billion Bq - not exactly the easiest conversion constant to work with, especially when you have to go the other way: 1 Bq = 2.7 x 10^-11 Ci = 27 pCi.

A few elements of interest and their specific activities - that is, their activity per gram - are given in Table 5.

Table 5 – Specific Activities of Selected Elements
Element	Curies	Becquerels	Half-Life
Thorium 232	0.000000166	4,316	14.05 billion years
Uranium 238	0.000000333	12,300	4.47 billion years
Potassium 40	0.00000722	267,200	1.27 billion years
Radium 226	1	37 billion	1,620 years
Strontium 90	139	5,143 billion	28.8 years
Cesium 134	1,290	47,900 billion	2.06 years
Iodine 131	124,000	4,588 trillion	8.04 days
Tellurium 133	113,000,000	4,200,000 trillion	12.4 minutes

Note that the half-life of the low activity 238U is very long - 4.5 billion years, while one-half the very active 131I isotope is gone in 8.04 days. We would expect this, since there are a finite number of atoms in a gram of any substance, and if the rate of decay (i.e., the activity) is high, it will take less time for the substance to lose its radioactivity. This is verified by the very low relative activity of the primordial radionuclides such as thorium, uranium and potassium, which have extremely long half-lives since these were presumably created at the same time as the Earth - estimated by most cosmologists as some 4.6 billion years ago. The shorter half-life isotopes - say a mere few million years or so - are long gone, although some are being replaced by decay products of the low activity elements.