4.2.19

Uses for Isotopes With Different Half-lives

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Uses for Isotopes With Different Half-lives

Different radioactive isotopes have different half-lives that make them suitable for different uses.

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Iodine-123

  • Iodine-123 has a half-life of 13.2 hours.
  • This makes it suitable for treating cancerous cells.
    • Because its half-life is so short, Iodine-123 doesn’t do much damage to healthy cells after the treatment is done.
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Iodine-131

  • Iodine-131 has a half-life of 8 days. This means it can be used in medical tracers to see how well the thyroid gland is working.
    • Iodine-131 has a long enough half-life for us to monitor (watch) how well the gland is functioning (working) over a good period of time.
    • At the same time, the amount of harm caused is limited as the patient does not need to receive extra doses.
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Radiotherapy

  • Radiotherapy can kill cells and destroy tissue inside the body.
  • In radiotherapy, high doses of radiation can kill mutated cells (cancers), but the radiation can also kill healthy cells.

Jump to other topics

1Energy

2Electricity

3Particle Model of Matter

4Atoms & Radiation

5Forces

5.1Basics of Motion

5.2Forces

5.3Effects of Forces

5.4Pressure

6Waves

7Magnetism

8Astrophysics

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