Episode 304
Thorium
Mon, 2018-Mar-05 01:00 UTC
Length - 3:02
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Welcome to featured Wiki of the Day where we read the summary of the featured Wikipedia article every day.
The featured article for Monday, 5 March 2018 is Thorium.
Thorium is a weakly radioactive metallic chemical element with symbol Th and atomic number 90. Thorium metal is silvery and tarnishes black when it is exposed to air, forming the dioxide; it is moderately hard, malleable, and has a high melting point. Thorium is an electropositive actinide whose chemistry is dominated by the +4 oxidation state; it is quite reactive and can ignite in air when finely divided.
All known thorium isotopes are unstable. The most stable isotope, 232Th, has a half-life of 14.05 billion years, or about the age of the universe; it decays very slowly via alpha decay, starting a decay chain named the thorium series that ends at stable 208Pb. In the universe, thorium and uranium are the only two radioactive elements that still occur naturally in large quantities as primordial elements. It is estimated to be over three times more abundant than uranium in the Earth's crust, and is chiefly refined from monazite sands as a by-product of extracting rare-earth metals.
Thorium was discovered in 1829 by the Norwegian amateur mineralogist Morten Thrane Esmark and identified by the Swedish chemist Jöns Jacob Berzelius, who named it after Thor, the Norse god of thunder. Its first applications were developed in the late 19th century. Thorium's radioactivity was widely acknowledged during the first decades of the 20th century. In the second half of the century, thorium was replaced in many uses due to concerns about its radioactivity.
Thorium was formerly used as an alloying element in TIG welding electrodes, as a material in high-end optics and scientific instrumentation, and as the light source in gas mantles, but these have become marginal uses. It has been suggested as a replacement for uranium as nuclear fuel in nuclear reactors, and several thorium reactors have been built.
This recording reflects the Wikipedia text as of 01:00 UTC on Monday, 5 March 2018.
For the full current version of the article, go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium.
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This has been Kendra. Thank you for listening to featured Wiki of the Day.
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