Short compared to the Earth's age.
I am not that sure. We know for the natural nuclear reactors.
They could be deep inside the Earth as well. Heavy atoms do fall toward the center of the planet. You can't exclude ever better circumstances for the ongoing natural nuclear reactors deep down and the still rising number of them.
It is not granted, but not excluded also. It might be that the planet's interior is more and more radioactive. Possible if not probable.
I have a whimsical challenge for you: come up with problems with numerical solutions that are hard to estimate.
This, like surprisingly many things, originates from a Richard Feynman story:
So what would you ask Richard Feynman to solve? Think of this as the reverse of Fermi Problems.
Number theory may be a rich source of possibilities here; many functions there are wildly fluctuating, require prime factorization and depend upon the exact value of the number rather than it's order of magnitude. For example, I challenge you to compute the largest prime factor of 650238.
(My original example was: "For example, I challenge you to compute the greatest common denominator of 10643 and 15047 without a computer. This problem has the nice advantage of being trivial to make harder to compute - just throw in some extra primes." It has been pointed out that I forgot Euclid's algorithm and have managed to choose about the only number theoretic question that does have an efficient solution.)