Talk:Thorium

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Use in cavity magnetrons filaments (used in microwave ovens)

The page on cavity magnetrons states Thorium is used in the filaments of the magnetron. It would be interesting to find references to support this and to mention it under the applications for / uses of Thorium.

Radioactive elements

Article currently reads in part On Earth, thorium and uranium are the only significantly radioactive elements that still occur naturally in large quantities as primordial elements. Note the piping to primordial nuclide from primordial elements.

The whole concept of a radioactive element rather than a radioactive nuclide is dubious. Is potassium a radioactive element? It is radioactive enough to account for much of the Earth's radioactivity, and nearly all of your own. But most potassium is not radioactive. Andrewa (talk) 03:46, 4 October 2023 (UTC)

@Andrewa: Perhaps "significantly radioactive elements" could be reworded to "elements with no stable isotopes". It's true that every element has radioactive isotopes, yet the term "radioactive element" is still in widespread use for elements with no stable isotopes, though it would perhaps be less ambiguous to use the latter wording. ^Complex/_Rational 12:50, 4 October 2023 (UTC)

That would be a great improvement.

Done. ^Complex/_Rational 15:38, 5 October 2023 (UTC)

Agree that the term "radioactive element" is still in widespread use for elements with no stable isotopes (my emphasis) but is it in such use in reliable sources? Or is it just a matter of folklore? Andrewa (talk) 14:34, 5 October 2023 (UTC)

Yes, there are numerous recently-published peer-reviewed articles that use the term "radioactive element". However, a few of them also use the term to mean "radioisotope" (e.g., the radioactive element Cs-137), in which case clarity is still called for. ^Complex/_Rational 15:38, 5 October 2023 (UTC)

Examples?

It's disappointing that they use the term radioactive element when you think they mean "radioisotope" and when they really seem to mean radionuclide. Cs-137 is a nuclide and a radionuclide and a radioisotope, but it is an isotope of Cesium. Just to refer to it as a radioisotope is careless. And surely Cesium itself would not be considered a radioactive element , any more than Potassium would be despite the importance of Potassium-40.

Many people do say radioisotope when they mean radionuclide or even radiopharmeceutical. But surely, we would not regard such sources as reliable sources so far as this terminology goes? In fact radioisotope, radionuclide and radiopharmeceutical are three different things, and the fact that they are often confused in some sources should not lead us to repeat their error. A source can be reliable for some information but not for other information.

Looking forward to your sources. Note that Wikipedia is not itself regarded as a reliable source, and in the case of those articles linked to above, perhaps that is just as well. Andrewa (talk) 18:21, 6 October 2023 (UTC)

As I understand, radioisotope and radionuclide are generally used interchangeably to refer to any unstable nuclide; at best, the difference would be similar to that between isotope and nuclide, i.e., whether they are of the same element. However, radiopharmeceutical unambiguously refers to drugs containing radioactive nuclides, and I don't see how it would be confused with the other two; even if it's used to refer to the bare nuclide (not technically correct), we would still only be dealing with a small subset of radionuclides.

The terminology used on Wikipedia should reflect the consensus of what is considered correct among reliable sources. Any potential mistakes can be rectified by simply following such a consensus in our article, citing other sources as appropriate. Of course Wikipedia should not blindly quote another source and propagate mistakes.

Here are several examples (this list is far from exhaustive) of usage:

• [1] – original discovery of plutonium, "radioactive element 94"
• [2] – some terminology confusion
• [3] – more of the same; perhaps in geology a looser definition is used
• [4] – although Phyiscs Today is not a peer-reviewed journal, it is the official magazine of the American Institute of Physics; the abstract calls radium a radioactive element
• [5] – about promethium, also uses the term "exclusively radioactive element"
• [6] – specifically names thorium and uranium as radioactive elements (alongside non-radioactive rare earth metals)

^Complex/_Rational 22:06, 6 October 2023 (UTC)