this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2024
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It will be radioactive forever. The question is where you put the threshold, which is fairly arbitrary.
If you only think about half live then yes it would be radioactive forever but in reality after a long time every atom would've decayed into non radioactive elements.
You can even calculate the expected time it would take for the random process of decay to terminate.
"after a long time" - that is exactly my point. Where do you draw the line? It will never be non-radioactive, which the headline suggest would be the case in 1'500 years. As far as we know, everything might decay after some time. It will always have some Radon get trapped in it. Scatter some cosmic rays. Blablabla.
By that logic, everything withing a few kilometers of the surface is radioactive, especially all life. That's not a useful definition of radioactive.
Hence my post, the relevant metric is "how much", not "if".