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
Every radioactive element releases a certain amount of energy as it decays. Some elements decay in fractions of a second, so they release a ton of energy. Other elements decay over thousands to millions of years, so they release the energy very slowly. Iodine decays slowly enough for it to travel through the environment and potentially be absorbed by people, but quickly enough that it releases quite a bit of energy which is damaging to the body.
Iodine specifically is dangerous because it is one of the only radioactive fission products that is used by the body. There are radioactive versions of other elements, but they are not inherently radioactive, they are induced because of neutrons. Hence the occurrence of these versions is extremely low, and they can’t accumulate in quantities large enough to cause any harm
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