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
Because it’s not that common in the environment, so your thyroid has evolved to be very good at grabbing it out of your blood stream.
Iodine is a common product when uranium fissions so a good portion–like several percent–of the radioactivity is from iodine. The isotopes also have short half lives, and combined with it’s abundance causes a huge amount of radioactivity. Your thyroid concentrating it makes things even worse. It creates an intense source (because of all the iodine) at close range (inside your body) which will give big doses to organs like your brain, lungs, and bone marrow in your ribs. Those big doses are what out you at risk of cancer. It’s the same reason other isotopes like cobalt-60 or strontium-90 are bad. Your biological processes hold on to them and keep them inside you.
They way the pill works is by flooding your system with stable, non-radioactive iodine so that your thyroid is “full” and doesn’t absorb the radioactive variety so your kidneys can remove it and you pee it out.
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