why does it take thousands or billions of years for some radioactive isotopes to fully decay?
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Because neutrons. When neutrons and protons are at the right balance,they tend to stick longer. Iron 56, with 26 protons and 30 neutrons is very very stable and therefore sticks around for a very long time.You could count all the atoms in the universe many many many many times over and yet Iron 56 wouldn’t have decayed. Other elements like Francium have a life of less than 2 decades and the longest lived isotope of Francium, Francium 223 has a half life of only 23 years,for comparison,Tellurium (or more specifically Tellurium 128) has a half life of 100 yottaseconds which is 160 trillion times the age of the current universe roughly 2,206,506,000,000,000,000,000,000 years.
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