You are half right. Here is an example of rescuing devices employed by some of your creationists:
(Y)oung-Earth creationists now argue that radioisotope decay has actually occurred, can be measured accurately, and that it would require billions of years at present rates to account for the current condition of the Earth. The scientific community has been making those very arguments for decades. The RATE team, however, because of their unshakable Biblical faith in a 6,000 year old Earth, rejects uniformitarianism (Humphreys 2005:93) and argues that the rate of decay was greatly accelerated during the first two days of Creation Week and during the year-long Flood of Noah (DeYoung 2005:150-151)…
There are, however, a number of serious difficulties with RATE’s hypothesis of accelerated decay. The RATE creationists acknowledge two of the most fundamental side effects of any such acceleration: heat and radiation. Aggregated over the 4.5 billion year history of Earth, radioactive decay has produced tremendous amounts of both. The acceleration of 4 billion years of decay into the first two days of the creation week and squeezing 500 million years into the year of the Flood (DeYoung 2005:150-151) is rather problematic. The Flood acceleration alone would have released enough energy to heat the Earth to a temperature of more than 22,000° C (Snelling 2005:183), which is roughly four times the temperature of the surface of the sun (DeYoung 2005:152). That amount of energy would have caused rocks, and presumably the entire crust of the Earth, to vaporize (DeYoung 2005:152; Snelling 2005:183). Aside from the fact that the planet would no longer exist, the geologic evidence RATE cites in support of acceleration would certainly have been obliterated. Temperatures above 150-400° C would have erased the fission tracks and radiohalos, and destroyed the zircon crystals cited by RATE (DeYoung 2005:152; Snelling 2005:182). In fact, the temperature increase in the zircons would have been an order of magnitude higher than average because of their abnormally high concentration of uranium (Snelling 2005:183). Helium diffusion improves rapidly at higher temperatures, so that would seem to contradict RATE’s claims about diffusion.
D. Russell Humphreys of the RATE team makes a novel suggestion regarding heat accumulation. Simply put, at the same moment God accelerated radioisotope decay, he also expanded the size of the universe twenty-fold (DeYoung 2005:153). This is an application of volumetric cooling, which is how refrigerators work by compressing and expanding gas. Humphreys argues the Bible contains scriptural evidence for two periods of cosmic expansion that coincide with RATE’s proffered two periods of accelerated decay (Humphreys 2005:73). For example, Psalms 104:2 says, “Who coverest thyself with light as with a garment: who stretchest out the heavens like a curtain” (CreationWiki 2005). The problem is that volumetric cooling only works for gases, not solids. In other words, there is no way a 22,000° C Earth could have been cooled through surface conduction before it exploded (Vardiman et al. 2005:763). It seems clear that even the divine intervention to expand the universe in four dimensions proposed by Humphreys would be inadequate to solve the heat problem (Vardiman et al. 2005:763).
Do you really think this is the sort of thing any thinking person should take seriously? There’s more given at the full article:
http://apps.usd.edu/esci/creation/age/content/creationism_and_young_earth/accelerated_decay.html