If elements decay randomly (even though they usually decay away in a predictable period of time) could something decay instantly?

Question

So, I was told that, while radioactive elements have half lives that have been estimated (i.e. the time it takes for a material to decay to half it’s mass), kt’s not entirely predictable how often particles will decay in a given moment. If all that is true (which it might not be, feel free to correct in replies), is there a chance, if microscopically small, that a uranium rod could just fizzle out of existence in a matter of nanoseconds?

In: 6

Answer 1

>is there a chance, if microscopically small, that a uranium rod could just fizzle out of existence in a matter of nanoseconds?

Yes.

Well…

There’s a teeny-tiny-eensie-weensie-infinitesimally small chance that a rod of uranium could all decay at the same time. I’m not going to describe to you how small, because there’s no meaningful way that I can get you to understand it. I could list the things that are more or less likely, but we’re really into “monkeys on keyboards reproducing Shakespeare” territory here.

But to another part of your question: that won’t cause it to “fizzle out of existence”, because when an atom undergoes radioactive decay, it doesn’t catastrophically cease to exist. In the case of uranium (all known isotopes, as it happens), it decays into a helium nucleus and an atom of Thorium.

There are other modes of decay – about one one hundred trillionth of time, U238 (the most common isotope, over 99% of natural uranium) will instead decay by emitting two electrons and turn into plutonium. About 200 billionths of the time, U235 decays by spontaneous fission instead of spitting out a helium nucleus and turning into thorium “like it should”, and about 50 millions of the time, U238 does this.

But those constitute a very small percent of total events, and they also don’t cause the atoms involved to “fizzle out of existence”.

If you had a rod of uranium and every single atom decayed at the same time, what you would be left with would be a very very hot rod of thorium that would probably almost immediately evaporate. There’s a good chance that there will be an explosion involved at some point from how quickly the metal evaporates. But I don’t think “superhot metal evaporating” is what you meant when you said “fizzle out of existence”. ‘Cause, you know, the metal’s still all there in the room with you, just in gas form.