Does it make sense? Is this statement clearly true or false? Explain your reasoning.?

Question

The half-life of plutonium-239 is about 24,000 years, so we can expect some of the plutonium produced in recent decades to still be around 100,000 years from now.

Answer 1

It is clearly true.
The halflife is the amount of time it takes for half of the atoms in a sample to decay. But it does not mean that the other half will be gone in the second period of time, only half of what is remaining.
So in 24,000 years you will have 1/2, in another 24,000 years you will have 1/2 of that, or 1/4. In another 24,000 years you will have half of that or 1/8. In another 24,000 years you will have 1/16, and when 100,000 years is past, you will have between 1/16 and 1/32 of the original amount.

The link has educational illustrations of the process.

;-D It is better not to make any in the first place!

Answer 2

Some of the plutonium will always be around, forever!! U see, the activity decreases to half with each half life that passes. It is easy to see that if u continue to divide the mass of plutonium which remains by half, then there is no way u can get a mass of zero! There is no number which when divded by 2 gives zero. So the decay will be exponential, thus never reaching zero.
Tell me if that helps...

Answer 3

Clearly true- 100,000 divided by 24,000 is a little more than 4 hald lives. If you have 100% now at the end of the first half life period you would have 50%, at the end of the second 25%, third 12.5%, 4th half life 6.25%. "some" is a relative term but I think it covers 6%.

Answer 4

I would say it is not clearly true.

There are other circumstances that can be considered. What is to stop the plutonium from being destroyed by using it all in a nuclear bomb? If plutonium being "produced" is such a simple task, it must be similarly simple to reverse the process and destroy it.

Answer 5

It makes sense to me. 100k years is just over four times the 24 millennium half life mentioned, so I would expect a little under 1/16 of the original substance to remain, if there was a large enough chunk to begin with.

Answer 6

NO... If we don't destroy ourselves by our stupidity... we will in 50-100 years or so most certainly discover how to do fusion.. we can then burn the plutonium in the fusion reactor and neutralize it. Or simply send it to the Sun.

Answer 7

is true in calculation sense that why we have problem
is storage of radioactive waste worldwide.
just do not throw them into the ocean to make the problem disappear or soon we have normal fishs disappearing too