Abstract
One focus of the RATE (Radioisotopes and the Age of The Earth) project was radiohalos research. It was concluded that the uranium (238U) and polonium (Po) radiohalos frequently found in granitic rocks had to have formed simultaneously. This implies that hundreds of millions of years of radioactive decay (at today's rates) had to have occurred in a matter of a few days! There needs to have been that much decay of 238U to produce both the visible physical damage (the radiohalos) and the required Po, but that much Po would then have decayed within a few days (because of its short half-lives, that is, very rapid decay rates). So radioisotope "ages" for such granitic rocks of hundreds of millions of years, calculated on the assumption that radioactive decay has always occurred at today's rates, are grossly in error, and these rocks would thus have formed during the Flood year only 4500 years ago. A hydrothermal fluid (hot water) transport model was thus proposed which explained how the Po was separated from its parent 238U and then concentrated in radiocenters close by to form the Po radiohalos.