So one thing that I like about nuclear reactions is that we get to that lower level elements in the periodic table and you'll start to notice that they have names that you're familiar with, names connected to countries, to planets, to people. Here in this example question it says provide a balanced nuclear reaction for alpha decay of americium 241. Here it says show gamma emission.

Now americium is named after America, so it's AMERICIUM. So here I'm Americium 241. Its mass number is 241. If you look on the periodic table, its atomic number is 95. We say that it undergoes alpha decay, so it would emit an alpha particle which is 4/2α and then it also emits a gamma particle which is not going to change anything, right?

So remember your mass number on both sides have to be the same. Your number of protons overall have to be the same on both sides. We have 241 here on the reactant side, so we need 241 on the product side. Four of them are coming from the alpha particle, so the remaining 237 have to be part of our new isotope. Here we have 95 protons on the reactant side, so we need 95 protons on the product side. Two of them are coming from the alpha particle, meaning we need 93 more.

This, if we look on the periodic table 93, gives us neptunium named after Neptune. So again, when we get down to these heavy elements, we can see these interesting names. Again, they're being gifted. Well, not gifted people who have contributed to chemistry in some regard or in terms of a country or in terms of a planet. You'll start seeing that there's even an element for Einstein.

OK, so for this one we have Americium 241 undergoing alpha decay mixed with gamma emission to give us Neptunium 237.