Re:Japan nuclear body says radioactive water at Fukushima an...
by VLM on Monday August 05, 2013 @03:28PM
(#6162333)
OK you motivated me to look up the biological half life of tritiated water which is about the same as regular water, it doesn't isotopically partition very much in the body.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritiated_water
There's an interesting wikipedia article about total body water where you basically figure out how much water is in your body in an absolute sense by consuming some D2O (or I suppose for those who want to live on the wild side, T2O) and the results keep coming up as a half life around ten days in the body. It just doesn't bioaccumulate. I think you're thinking of the heavy metal boneseekers or radioiodine accumulating in the ... gland thats by your throat (I forget?)
You are correct that mathematically you never really excrete all the T2O. However once the level decays below a banana equivalent dose, it just doesn't matter anymore.
However, the general problem I have with articles about the dangers of radioactivity is, that they almost never contain enough information to actually judge how dangerous it is. It is usually easy to get a factor of 100 or more variation in the dangers of radioactivity, based on the exact contamination scenario, the precise isotope abundances etc. So even Pu is not always very bad, since PuO is almost insoluble in water, which can be used for nice party tricks [1]:
[1] http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter13.html