Between Osmium And Radium

[purpleranger]

ENTRY #44
1003.05

Recently, I have been doing some ruminating, speculating, cogitating, meditating, and all sorts of other random thinking, and it is time I shared these thoughts with you. The subject of all this deep thinking is Astatine.

I suspect the first thought to go through your mind is, "WhatAstatine is an element. Atomic number 85,

Comments

[billroper]

Astatine is more unstable than its neighbors on the periodic table simply because elements with an odd number of protons are less stable than those with an even number of protons (all other things being equal). As eka-iodine, it's going to have a chemistry that's pretty similar to iodine's, so it'll form salts with alkali metals and unstable covalent bonds with carbon. (Iodoform is much easier to decompose than chloroform, as I discovered once by accident in the lab.)

Astatine would be less hazardous than radon, because radon is primarily dangerous due to inhalation. Once it gets in the lungs, it's relatively heavy, so it doesn't get flushed out and drops alpha particles into nice soft lung tissue.

Does that help?

[purpleranger]

To some degree. As I said at the beginning, I was just having some fun speculating.

What was this lab accident that you had with iodoform? That sounds like an interesting story.