rhis is an informal report intended primarily for internal or limited external Estribution. The opinions and conclusions stated are those of the author and may )r may not be those of the Laboratory.

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The good-as-new postulate applied to radioactivity says: The conditional probability that a radioactive atom will ’’live’’ past time s+t, given that it has lived past time s, is equal to the unconditional probability that it would have lived past time t, starting from time zero. This postulate leads directly to the conclusion that the decay time of a radioactive atom is an exponentially distributed random variable. Add the postulate that the decay times of individual atoms in an aggregrate of identical radioactive atoms are independent, and a complete description of the random behavior of an aggregrate can be constructed. This approach stresses from the outset the randomness inherent in the radioactive decay process and is offered as a complement to the deterministic approach that treats fluctuations about mean values. All results are exact within the context of the model and are applicable to aggregrates of any size—no assumptions about large numbers are required.

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