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Originally Posted by Skybird
Quiztime. Is Plutonium a "natural" element"? It was not created by mother nature, but by man, in the lab. Naturally, to our knowledge it does not exist anywhere in the nature known to man.
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Plutonium, like all radiological elements (if not all elements), has a half-life. The most common isotope is Plutonium-239, the one used for nuclear weapons, which has a half-life of 24,100 years and is'nt found in nature because it has allready decayed. A more stable isotope is Pu-244, with a half life of 80 milin years and is the nucleon-richest atom that naturally occurs in the Earth's crust, but in very small quantities.
Im fascinated by nuclear physics and since i quit smoking (allmost a month ago) have developed insomnia so i have way too much time to look into things like this.