Radon
Noble gasgasblock p
A radioactive noble gas that seeps out of uranium-bearing rock into basements and is the second leading cause of lung cancer after smoking.
| Atomic number | 86 |
| Mass number (longest-lived isotope) | 222 g/mol |
| This element has no stable isotope, so it has no standard atomic weight. The figure above is the mass number of its longest-lived isotope — a convention, not a measurement of a natural mixture. | |
| Group · period | 18 · 6 |
| Electron configuration | [Xe] 4f¹⁴ 5d¹⁰ 6s² 6p⁶ |
About Radon
Radon-222 is the gaseous daughter of radium-226 in the uranium-238 chain, and being chemically inert it diffuses freely out of granite, shale and phosphate rock instead of staying put. Its 3.8-day half-life is long enough to reach a basement and short enough to matter: the decay products are solid alpha emitters that lodge in lung tissue, and radon is now blamed for roughly 20000 lung cancer deaths a year in the United States alone, second only to smoking. Testing is cheap and mitigation is usually just a fan and a pipe under the slab. Radon is also the densest gas known at 9.7 g/L, about eight times air, and the reason it pools in cellars and mine workings rather than dispersing.
Moles from Mass (n = m/M)
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Gas Density from Molar Mass
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Faraday's Law of Electrolysis (m = QM/nF)
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Ion Concentration as CaCO₃ Equivalent
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Acid Feed to Reduce Alkalinity
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