Help!! Chemical properties of radioisotope. (1 Viewer)

[9876543210]

does anyone know what the chemical properties of cobalt-60 (radiotherapy) and caesium-137 (thickness gauges in industry) are???

 

[independantz]

wikipedia is your friend.

From what i can remember for cobalt-60, it has a half life of 6years and is a gamma ray emiiter so it can be used to preserve foods, by passing gamma rays through them and destroying microbes etc...

 

[minijumbuk]

wikipedia is your friend.

From what i can remember for cobalt-60, it has a half life of 6years and is a gamma ray emiiter so it can be used to preserve foods, by passing gamma rays through them and destroying microbes etc...

I think those are nuclear properties, and not chemical.

Hmm, I'm not sure about those radioisotopes, since I did not do them, but chemical properties generally refer to their reactions in different environments. E.g. Technetium 99m can be carried in blood without reacting, so it can perform its function in diagnostics while keeping the patient safe, as the intake of the Tc-99m won't harm body cells.

That would be the chemical properties of Tc-99m.
The nuclear properties would be: releases gamma radiation, has a half life of ~5 hours.

 

[sinophile]

Im pretty sure chemical properties don't depend on the isotope, because different isoptopes have only different nuclei. You could just look up chemical properties of those elements if youre only interested in chemical properties,m rather than nuclear properties

 

[Pwnage101]

does anyone know what the chemical properties of cobalt-60 (radiotherapy) and caesium-137 (thickness gauges in industry) are???

independantz is right

for this dot point they want half life and whether it is high/low energy radiation and the type it is

 

[badquinton304]

Cobalt-60 is completely insoluble in water so I guess that would help with potential contamination of bodily fluids. Cs-137 is soluble in water but I do not know how that would help.

 

[bored of sc]

The board of studies use "chemical properties" in this context to mean half life, type of radiation emitted etc. It is used incorrectly though since chemical properties actually means the ways in which atoms interact via electron transfer, sharing etc rather than the way the 'nucleus' changes.