MIT 22.01 Introduction to Nuclear Engineering and Ionizing Radiation, Fall 2016 - 11. Radioactivity and Series Radioactive Decays

MIT 22.01 Introduction to Nuclear Engineering and Ionizing Radiation, Fall 2016 Instructor: Michael Short View the complete course: https://ocw.mit.edu/22-01F16 YouTube Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUl4u3cNGP61FVzAxBP09w2FMQgknTOqu A formalism is derived to describe how one radioactive isotope can become another, then another, and so on. We develop first-order, linear differential equations to describe the rates of these simultaneous decay processes, and introduce a few methods of solving them - analytically (the hard way), graphically (the intuitive way, without any math), and using approximations in cases where one decay constant is wildly different from the others. We also go beyond the textbook to introduce 'burning' of isotopes, or creation/destruction via nuclear reactions, and show that it can be perfectly modeled using the same equations. Production of medical isotopes and radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs) are modeled using these equations. License: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA More information at https://ocw.mit.edu/terms More courses at https://ocw.mit.edu