The Fukushima nuclear power plant incident has made everyone acutely aware of how dangerous nuclear energy can be. Everyone knows that radiation is very poisonous, and is not save at any dosage level. But I myself was a bit perplexed about the effect that radioactive iodine can have on humans. So I had to go back and do a bit of homework on it.
The form of iodine that is radioactive is an isotope, known as iodine-131 or radioiodine. It has a half-life of approximately 8 days. Although it is used mostly in medical and pharmaceutical applications, it is most notorious for its role as a major radioactive agent present in nuclear fission products. It was a leading cause of the deleterious health effects from open-air atomic bomb testing in the 1950′s, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, and is a dreaded concern in reference to the recent Japanese nuclear crisis. continue reading…