text: Some isotopes/nuclides are radioactive, and are therefore referred to as radioisotopes or radionuclides, whereas others have never been observed to decay radioactively and are referred to as stable isotopes or stable nuclides. For example,  is a radioactive form of carbon, whereas  and  are stable isotopes. There are about 339 naturally occurring nuclides on Earth, of which 286 are primordial nuclides, meaning that they have existed since the Solar System's formation.
  Primordial nuclides include 35 nuclides with very long half-lives (over 100 million years) and 251 that are formally considered as "stable nuclides", because they have not been observed to decay. In most cases, for obvious reasons, if an element has stable isotopes, those isotopes predominate in the elemental abundance found on Earth and in the Solar System. However, in the cases of three elements (tellurium, indium, and rhenium) the most abundant isotope found in nature is actually one (or two) extremely long-lived radioisotope(s) of the element, despite these elements having one or more stable isotopes.
  Theory predicts that many apparently "stable" nuclides are radioactive, with extremely long half-lives (discounting the possibility of proton decay, which would make all nuclides ultimately unstable). Some stable nuclides are in theory energetically susceptible to other known forms of decay, such as alpha decay or double beta decay, but no decay products have yet been observed, and so these isotopes are said to be "observationally stable". The predicted half-lives for these nuclides often greatly exceed the estimated age of the universe, and in fact, there are also 31 known radionuclides (see primordial nuclide) with half-lives longer than the age of the universe.
  Adding in the radioactive nuclides that have been created artificially, there are 3,339 currently known nuclides. These include 905 nuclides that are either stable or have half-lives longer than 60 minutes. See list of nuclides for details.