Rutherford to Becquerel Converter

About this calculator

The rutherford (Rd) was a unit of radioactivity introduced in 1946 and named after physicist Ernest Rutherford, defined as 10⁶ disintegrations per second, i.e. 1 Rd = 10⁶ Bq. It was proposed as a more convenient, round-number alternative to the curie for laboratory-scale sources, but never gained wide traction and was largely abandoned within a couple of decades once the SI adopted the becquerel (1 Bq = 1 decay/second) as the standard unit of activity in 1975.

Anyone reading older nuclear-physics or radiochemistry literature from the mid-20th century encounters the rutherford and needs to convert it to becquerels or curies (1 Rd = 1/37,000 Ci) to compare against modern measurements, which is essentially the only context this converter is used in today.