Radon is a chemical element; it has symbol Rn and atomic number 86. It is a radioactive noble gas and is colorless and odorless. Of the three naturally occurring radon isotopes, only 222Rn has a sufficiently long half-life (3.825 days) for it to be released from the soil and rock where it is generated. Radon isotopes are the immediate decay products of radium isotopes. The instability of 222Rn, its most stable isotope, makes radon one of the rarest elements. Radon will be present on Earth for several billion more years despite its short half-life, because it is constantly being produced as a step in the decay chains of 238U and 232Th, both of which are abundant radioactive nuclides with half-lives of at least several billion years. The decay of radon produces many other short-lived nuclides, known as "radon daughters", ending at stable isotopes of lead. 222Rn occurs in significant quantities as a step in the normal radioactive decay chain of 238U, also known as the uranium series, which slowly decays into a variety of radioactive nuclides and eventually decays into stable 206Pb. 220Rn occurs in minute quantities as an intermediate step in the decay chain of 232Th, also known as the thorium series, which eventually decays into stable 208Pb. Radon was discovered in 1899 by Ernest Rutherford and Robert B. Owens at McGill University in Montreal, and was the fifth radioactive element to be discovered. First known as "emanation", the radioactive gas was identified during experiments with radium, thorium oxide, and actinium by Friedrich Ernst Dorn, Rutherford and Owens, and André-Louis Debierne, respectively, and each element's emanation was considered to be a separate substance: radon, thoron, and actinon. Sir William Ramsay and Robert Whytlaw-Gray considered that the radioactive emanations may contain a new element of the noble gas family, and isolated "radium emanation" in 1909 to determine its properties. In 1911, the element Ramsay and Whytlaw-Gray isolated was accepted by the International Commission for Atomic Weights, and in 1923, the International Committee for Chemical Elements and the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) chose radon as the accepted name for the element's most stable isotope, 222Rn; thoron and actinon were also recognized by IUPAC as distinct isotopes of the element. A common source of environmental radon is uranium-containing minerals in the ground. Radon can also occur in ground water, such as spring waters and hot springs. Radon trapped in permafrost may be released by climate-change-induced thawing of permafrosts, and radon may also be released into groundwater and the atmosphere following seismic events leading to earthquakes, which has led to its investigation in the field of earthquake prediction. It is possible to test for radon in buildings, and to use techniques such as sub-slab depressurization for mitigation. Epidemiological studies have shown a clear association between breathing high concentrations of radon and incidence of lung cancer. Radon is a contaminant that affects indoor air quality worldwide. Because radon is denser than air it accumulates in basements and crawlspaces under dwellings. According to the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), radon is the second most frequent cause of lung cancer, after cigarette smoking, causing 21,000 lung cancer deaths per year in the United States. About 2,900 of these deaths occur among people who have never smoked. While radon is the second most frequent cause of lung cancer, it is the number one cause among non-smokers, according to EPA policy-oriented estimates. Significant uncertainties exist for the health effects of low-dose exposures. Due to local differences in geology, the level of exposure to radon gas differs by location.
Characteristics
Physical properties
Radon is a colorless, odorless, and tasteless gas and therefore is not detectable by human senses alone. At standard temperature and pressure, it forms a monatomic gas with a density of 9.73 kg/m3, about 8 times the density of the Earth's atmosphere at sea level, 1.217 kg/m3. It is one of the densest gases at room temperature (a few are denser, e.g. CF3(CF2)2CF3 and WF6) and is the densest of the noble gases. Radon is colorless at standard temperature and pressure. When cooled below its boiling point of 211.5 K (−61.6 °C; −79.0 °F), concentrated liquid radon emits radioluminescence of varying color; solidified radon emits a blue to yellow to red light when cooled further beyond its freezing point of 202 K (−71 °C; −96 °F). Due to the hazards associated with high concentrations of radon, liquid and solid radon is almost never seen. Measurements of the solubility of radon-222 are unusual in that they take advantage of radon's radioactivity to compare the amount in gas and in solution.
Chemical properties
… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.
