 123I for medical applications has also been produced at Oak Ridge National Laboratory by proton cyclotron bombardment of 80% isotopically enriched tellurium-123.The detailed decay mechanism is electron capture (EC) to form an excited state of the nearly-stable nuclide tellurium-123 (its half life is so long that it is considered stable for all practical purposes).This excited state of 123Te produced is not the metastable nuclear isomer 123mTe (the decay of 123I does not involve enough energy to produce 123mTe), but rather is a lower-energy nuclear isomer of 123Te that immediately gamma decays to ground state 123Te at the energies noted, or else (13% of the time) decays by internal conversion electron emission (127 keV), followed by an average of 11 Auger electrons emitted at very low energies (50-500 eV).