Can radioactive decay rates change & Does it really matter?

Some out there may have heard that there has been a recent discovery that indicates that the decay rate of some radioactive elements may change very slightly in relation to the amount of solar radiation they are exposed to. Nobody knows if this might be due to nutrino particles or some other undiscovered particle that has yet to be discovered by science. Some (namely the creationists anti-evolutionists) are using this new discovery to throw out the validity of radioactive dating methods all-together saying somehow this proves radioactive dating is unreliable. Not so fast!

First of all, it has only been tested and verified by a couple labs, so until more information and testing is available I will not take these finding too seriously yet. But even if this phenomena is true, then what exactly would that mean for radioactive dating and it's reliability and consistency?

Well if you look at the actual findings; some of which are described here: http://dinosaurc14ages.com/changedecay.htm, you will see that the actual variation detected is quite small, around 0.3% for both chlorine-36 and silicon-32. So what are the implications of this variation? Well if you look at chlorine-36 as an example, it is used to date rock and fossils that are relatively old, since the half life of chlorine-36 is around 300,000 years. So if we take the seasonal variation found by the new findings at 0.3 % we see that some measurements could be off by an additional 900 years...well that doesn't seem so bad. If you say you found a fossil that is dated to 300, 000 years ago by a chlorine-36 sample then you would just adjust your accuracy by an additional  plus or minus 900 years. This doesn't change much of anything in the way of accuracy or reliability. Moreover, if you simply average across a calender yea,r the radioactive decay would still be extremely stable and these new findings fail to show anything that is significant to effect dating methods that we already use in the scientific community.

The study also has yet to verify or show the degree to which this phenomenon effects particular radioactive elements aside from chlorine-36, manganese-5, silicon-32,  radium-226 of which it was observed that these have only "seasonal variations of a few tenths of a percent in the decay rates of the respective isotopes" (Castelvecchi). So what about other radioactive elements like carbon, plutonium, uranium, or potassium? Well one study by Peter Cooper on plutonium-238 from the Cassini spacecraft indicates that it is not effected by solar radiation fluctuations at all. Since Cassini traveled very near to the sun going to Venus, and very far from the sun out near Saturn; you would expect that if this hypothesis of solar effect on radiation were true that the plutonium contained in the spacecraft would show larger fluctuations in decay. Well guess what? It didn't show any variation in decay rate (Cooper; arxiv.org/abs/0809.4248). This is evidence that the initial findings may very well be incorrect and that radioactive materials are not effected by variation in solar radiation, and at the very least perhaps only a few elements are effected to a very small degree.

So to all those out there who would use this new finding to debunk the long standing methods for radioactive dating, think again! There is no evidence here to show that any dating method is not valid, reliable and accurate. The very most that they could argue is that some dates that have been given may be off by a couple tenths of a percent at most. This would not change the vast majority of findings and conclusions made in the scientific community. So we can rest assured that the Earth is still roughly 4.5 billion years old, give or take a few million, and dinosaurs still lived over 65 million years ago give or take a few hundred thousand years, and mankind still has Africa as it's cradle around 250, 000 years ago give or take a couple thousand years.

What is interesting and possibly ground breaking with this apparent finding is that this may indicate that a brand new particle exists that had never been detected before. This could start a new debate within the physics community but surely after more testing has been done. But to all non-physicists, this is not a game changer.