Ivana Hughes

So a radioactive isotope will have a specific half-life.

And what that means is if you have, if you start out with say a thousand atoms of this isotope, after its half-life, you will have 500.

And after another half-life, you'll have 250 and so on.

And so after six, seven, call it even 10 half-lives, it's going to be gone from the environment.

So iodine-131 has a very short half-life.

It's eight days.

And so within a matter of weeks, it's gone from the environment.

But if you were there at the time of the explosion, and if you got exposed to iodine-131, that actually went on.

into your body, mostly because the iodine actually went into the grass and then the cows ate the grass and people drank the milk and so on.

But it goes right to your thyroid.

But it goes right to your thyroid and it has caused

who knows, numerous, numerous cancers in this country, but actually in many other parts of the world.

Strontium-90 and cesium-137 have half lives of about 30 years each.

That means they stick in the environment for a couple hundred years at least.

And what's interesting about both of these isotopes, strontium-90 is chemically similar to calcium.

And you know that when you drink milk or eat cheese or whatever, you're taking calcium, that calcium goes into your bones, it's building up your bone marrow.

And strontium-90 will go to those exact places.

So the reason we mentioned leukemia earlier, the reason that people got, and especially they called leukemia the atomic bomb disease in Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the bombings, the reason for that was the exposure to strontium-90.

Also, importantly, because it acts like calcium, it also gets incorporated by plants will take it up from the environment and you can you can ingest it.

Cesium-137 is the same half-life, you know.