All the chapter’s exercises, worked step-by-step, in the order they appear in the book: first the guided exercises in the text, then the end-of-chapter problems (numerical, conceptual, ranking, graphical, estimation, thought-experiments).
Worked exercises in the text
- Worked exercise — radon decay in a cellar
- Worked exercise — from activity to the age of a find
- Worked exercise — more thermonuclear than the Sun
End-of-chapter problems
- Binding energy of iron
- Radiocarbon dating
- Aston’s curve and the direction of energy release
- Activity of cobalt-60
- Fuel of a fission power plant
- Draw the binding energy curve
- From the phenomenological law to the exponential
- The Sun’s hydrogen consumption
- Mean lifetime of a mixed sample
- School polonium atomic battery
- Why nuclei don’t fall apart
- Why fission is favourable
- Relative stability of four nuclei
- Comparing mean lifetimes
- Atoms and activity in one gram of radium
- Repeated halving
- From the mass defect to the reaction Q-value
- Thought experiment: carbon with a tenfold half-life
- Thought experiment: without the strong force
- The reactor in numbers
- Caesium after Chernobyl
- Alpha, beta, gamma compared
- Why dose matters
- Decay measured in the laboratory
- Bomb against an asteroid
- Annual dose and equivalent X-rays
- Parent-daughter decay series
- Mass defect of tritium
- Why an excited nucleus emits gamma rays
- Radon in homes
- Cobalt-60 atomic battery
- Effective dose from different sources
- From the volume of helium-3 to the accumulation time
- Thought experiment: without quantum tunnelling
- Reading a graph: mass defect
- Alpha and beta decay schemes