Watching Chernobyl miniseries and a nuclear physicist gave a girl “stable iodine” saying it would prevent her thyroid from absorbing radioactive iodine, any attempt to Google this question got me results on radiation therapy.
Edit: I’m not asking about radiation treatment or iodine pills, I want to know why iodine specifically is so dangerous to our bodies when irradiated as opposed to other elements/molecules our bodies regularly use.
In: Biology
It’s a combination of the fact that your body craves iodine (and will eagerly uptake it out of anything in the environment), stores it in a dicey location (your thyroid gland), and the half-life of the radioactive iodine-131 (8 days) is really short relative to its biological half-life (12 days), so it’ll have a chance to spew a lot of radiation into you before your body gets rid of it.
So it’s a particularly vulnerable fission product for acute (short-term) exposure. It is not the only worrisome fission product by a long-shot, but among the short-term ones it is a really nasty combination of factors that makes it dangerous and hard to avoid (without taking the iodine pills that will make your body stop up-taking it).
The other fission products that are biologically worrisome tend to have longer half-lives (e.g., Sr-90 = 28 years) which means that they are more chronic risks than acute ones.
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