Radioisoptopes, radioactive isoptopes or a radionuclide (as used by some chemists), is a nucleus which is very unstable. The radionuclide is constantly under a process in which it is slowly decaying and disappearing. At this process it may emit gamma rays which are a form of electromagnetic radiation. The radionuclides are very important in our daily lives, for uses such as food, a healthy day, and water. Radioisotopes and nonradioactive isotopes can be of the same element, it just depends on the atomic mass, and on the amount of neutrons present.

Whereas it may give us advantages, it also has a few disadvantages. It may be an actual danger for living organisms too.

You may, or you may not know it, but smoke detectors depend on the fact that they use a radioisotope to alarm us. A radioisotope known as americium-241 exists within the mechanism. Due to the properties of this radioisotope, it detects the smoke, almost as soon as it breaks out. This saves a lot of lives, and in fact studies prove that 80% of fires that break out, occur in a house or any other building that does not have smoke detectors installed.

www.chem.duke.edu/~jds/cruise_chem/nuclear/smoke.html

As mentioned before, while slowly decaying the radioisotope emits a ray called a gamma ray and scientists have learned to turn this gamma ray into a huge advantage on the food market. In fact, we use the gamma rays that comes from cobalt-60, to irradiate food from potential threats and hazards that exist within our food. It means that we simply kill the bacteria that are on the food. As an additional thing, it allows us to store our food for a longer amount of time, which is really useful for us. Some foods like potatoes and tomatoes, are irradiated in order to slow down the ripening time, allowing them to reach their highest ripeness when they arrive at the supermarket.

The irradiation is mostly used in Europe and North America, and is only allowed for foods such as herbs, spices and vegetables that contain almost no water. Some people do not buy the irradiated foods, because they suspect that there is some kind of disadvantage of the irradiation, and don’t seem to realize its true value to us. This happens because the people only know the general information about the irradiation and do not know the full details.

http://www.chem.duke.edu/~jds/cruise_chem/nuclear/dating.html

Radiosotopes have many uses. As an example, scientists have discovered that when organisms die, they have a maximum of carbon-14 to carbon-12 present in their cells. Over some time, the carbon slowly starts to decay, by a certain amount, so we can actually track back the existence of dead animals. This helps us a lot within the archeological discoveries. This means that we are able to find out, when dead organisms were living, even if they died a long, long time ago. This is called archeological dating.

Radioisotopes have benefits for us, but they also have disadvantages for us. If exposed to an organism in large doses or many times, it will have a sort of impact on this organism, depending on the organisms resistant strength and depending on the kind of radioisotope released onto the organism. That is why radioisotopes are very useful for humanity, if carefully used!