RATE project

The RATE project (Radioisotopes and the Age of The Earth) was a research project conducted by the Creation Research Society and the Institute for Creation Research between 1997 and 2005 to provide a young-Earth creationist perspectiove on radiometric dating and other dating techniques. It was funded by $250,000 from the Institute for Creation Research and over $1 million in donations.
RATE concluded that evidence supported over 500 million years of radiometric decay at today's rates, but claimed that some evidence pointed to a young earth. It therefore speculated that nuclear decay rates must have accelerated by a factor of approximately one billion on the first two days of the Creation week and during the Flood.
Non-affiliated experts who have scrutinised the claims have unanimously rejected these claims as flawed, noting that the integrity of science was compromised in favor of a message affirming the reliability of the Bible.
Findings
The RATE team acknowledged evidence for over 500 million years' worth of radioactive decay in the earth's history at today's rates. However, they claimed that other evidence indicated that the earth is much younger. The purported lines of evidence cited were:
* Helium diffusion in zircons: The authors claimed that the high concentration of helium in zircon crystals (ZrSiO<sub>4</sub>) could only be explained by young-earth timescales.
* Radiohalos in granites: The authors asserted that due to the short half-life of polonium, radiohalo damage should have annealed if the rocks had cooled at the much slower rates expected from geologic timescales.
* Isochron discordances: The authors presented several examples of cases where isochron dates from the same minerals using different techniques yielded discordant ages, differing by up to 10-15% after allowing for maximum errors, to argue that isochron dating is fundamentally flawed. However, they did not explain why errors of 15% would justify the claim that radioisotope dating is in error by six orders of magnitude, nor did they account for the numerous cases where isochron dating has given dates that are in good agreement with each other.
* Radiocarbon in ancient coals and diamonds: The authors argued that trace quantities of carbon-14 in diamonds, coals and other ancient rocks indicated that they were much younger than thought, as there should be no carbon-14 left after 100,000 years. However, the levels reported were consistent with levels expected from contamination and other extraneous sources, which are impossible to eliminate even when extraordinary care is taken in handling the samples, and chronologists disregard levels of carbon-14 below 0.5% of modern levels.
Accelerated nuclear decay
The authors speculated that nuclear decay rates were accelerated by a factor of approximately 500 million during the Creation week and at the time of the Flood. Short-lived isotopes such as C were not affected, while long-lived isotopes such as K were affected by a factor of a billion or more. Stable isotopes were apparently not affected.
The project has also been criticized by geologist Kevin Henke for, among other things, using faulty standard deviations, misidentifying rock samples, and correcting "typographical errors" in other researchers' data without providing any evidence that such corrections were warranted. The project's claim regarding helium diffusion in zircon was refuted by Gary Loechelt and Kevin Henke, who noted that, among other problems, the RATE team had used an unrealistic diffusion model, had misidentified the rock samples, had made incorrect assumptions about their thermal history, and had used incorrect standard deviations.

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