FMF - Friends of Minerals Forum, discussion and message board

[bugrock]

For those who are curious check the information on Wikipedia regarding
bismuth. Unfortunately only the manufactured bismuth xls are illustrated
and the way the entry is written there is no indication that good xls occur in
nature. We know better.

But the most amazing paragraph for me is quoted below. It is very difficult
for many to imagine events on a geological time scale but that pales trying to
imagine how long a piece of bismuth will naturally decay with time:

"While bismuth was traditionally regarded as the element with the heaviest stable isotope, bismuth-209, it had long been suspected to be unstable on theoretical grounds. This was finally demonstrated in 2003 when researchers at the Institut d'Astrophysique Spatiale in Orsay, France, measured the alpha emission half-life of 209Bi to be 1.9 × 10 [exp]19 years,[3] over a billion times longer than the current estimated age of the universe. Owing to its extraordinarily long half-life, for all presently-known medical and industrial applications bismuth can be treated as if it is stable and non-radioactive. The radioactivity is of academic interest, however, because bismuth is one of few elements whose radioactivity was suspected, and indeed theoretically predicted, before being detected in the laboratory." (quoted from Wikipedia)

Followup regarding bismuth-209 (the common isotope in nature). See the following entry in Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bismuth-209
(link normalized by FMF)