A radiation protection glossary for Radiation Protection Supervisors (RPS), Radiation Protection Advisers (RPA) and anyone else interesting in radiation safety terms and definitions. The glossary is a mixture of health physics , phrases related to radiation protection legislation, transport, practical safety, technical terms and similar.
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Published: Oct 12, 2018
Half-life is closely related to the property of Radioactive Decay and represents the time taken for half the Atoms in a Radioactive substances to undergo decay and change into another nuclear form (either a radioactive daughter product or a stable form). It is therefore the time taken for the Activity of a radioactive sample to decay by half and is commonly given the symbol t1/2.
Atoms are very special: they like certain particular partners, certain particular directions, and so on. It is the job of physics to analyze why each one wants what it wants.