#Air doc radon install
#Air doc radon series

Ultimately the uranium-238 decay series has over a dozen steps – each radioactive – before finally ending as stable lead. That decays, emitting another beta particle. When U-238 decays, it emits an alpha particle – two protons and two neutrons – and turns into thorium – specifically, Th-234. We need to start with uranium – particularly U-238, which comprises more than 99% of all the uranium on Earth. But maybe I should back up a little bit and talk about what radon is and its source.

#Air doc radon install

I’d be reluctant to decide to install an expensive radon mitigation system based on just one test, especially when testing is so much cheaper than mitigation. The more and more prolonged the tests, the more likely it is that you’ll know what your typical radon levels are, and that’s what’s important. Neither test will give a good idea of what the typical radon levels are in the basement – one will be too optimistic, the other pessimistic.Įven a two-week sample is only a snapshot in time to get a good idea about typical radon levels, you need to do several one or two-week tests or, better, do a test that lasts a few months. That’s one of the problems with radon testing – if the weather is cold and rainy, my basement will fail the test do it again six months later on a warm, dry day, and the same basement will pass with flying colors. The high-pressure air will help keep the radon locked in the soil, there’s no rain to fill the pores (forcing radon out), and the warming soil will be expanding and holding the radon better. If I could choose a time to do a radon sample, I’d prefer a dry day (ideally a dry week or two) with a high-pressure cell parked over my city – maybe sometime in April or May. A rainy day – especially when the soil is cooling off, will give us higher radon measurements. Radon is a gas produced by the radioactive decay of the element radium whose remote parent is either uranium or thorium.It could be worse, though – if I were writing this in, say, November or December instead of May, then the ground would be contracting, forcing radon out of pore spaces, and radon levels would be even higher. Radioactive decay is a natural, spontaneous process in which an atom of an unstable or radioactive isotope decays or breaks down to form another isotope by losing atomic particles (protons, neutrons, or electrons). When solid radium decays to form radon gas, it emits a bundle of two protons and two neutrons, an alpha particle, with great velocity (kinetic energy). Radon isotopes are also radioactive because they also decay, emitting another alpha particle and forming an unstable isotope of the element polonium, the first of four short-lived (radioactive) radon daughters, some of which emit yet more alpha radiation and some emitting beta and gamma radiation.Įlements that have important naturally-radioactive isotopes include uranium, thorium, and potassium, as well as radon and radium potassium is the only element in this list that has stable, nonradioactive isotopes. Uranium and thorium are the parent elements in a long series of radioactive decays (see Uranium and Thorium Decay Chains in our Water Science Basics section) that produces intermediate radium and radon daughter isotopes on the way to a stable isotope of lead. The four isotopes that follow radon in the decay chains all have relatively short half-lives and are collectively known as radon daughters. The decay of each radioactive element occurs at a very specific rate. How fast an element decays is measured in terms of the element 'half-life', or the amount of time for one half of a given amount of the element to decay. Uranium has a half-life of 4.4 billion years, so a 4.4-billion-year-old rock has only half of the uranium with which it started.