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
During nuclear fission you split Uranium, Thorium or Plutonium into smaller fission products. But these tends to be unstable isotopes. Some of these will have a very short half life, this makes them emit a lot of radiation but also become harmless very fast. Others have very long half lives meaning they will emit radiation for millions of years but never very much. There are also different types of radiation with alpha radiation being very harmful if you get it inside your body but not to anything else, then beta radiation and lastly gamma radiation which goes through almost anything but that means it will not stop to cause much damage. So even though there are lots of fission products being spread in a nuclear disaster we mostly focus on the medium half life radiation sources.
And about 2-3% of the fission products will be Iodine-131 with a half life of 8 days emitting beta radiation. So it will be a big source of the radiation in the weeks after a nuclear disaster. Especially since Iodine is a nutritional mineral. And isotopes are chemically indistinguishable from each other. So plants will absorb iodine in the dust and people will eat the plants in addition to dust that have fallen on food and the body will absorb this Iodine and carry it off to the thyroid for storage and processing. You need about 150µg of Iodine a day but can store much more then that. The body have no way of knowing that it is absorbing the radioactive isotope of Iodine and that it will slowly kill it. The way you prevent this from happening is to make sure the body have an excess of non-radioactive Iodine. If you do this then it will not take up more iodine and will flush it out in the urine. And this is what you see they do in the show.
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