nuclear-news

Additional information on tritium .

Robert Alvarez, 9 Aug 23,

To augment Gordon Edward;s ‘s excellent overview about tritium here are some other basic facts.

As for tritium being “mildly radioactive,” as Gordon points out, this is not the case when taken in the body- as tritiated water-the most common form of exposure. The Defense Nuclear Facility Safety Board overseeing DOE nuclear sites  informed the Secretary of Energy in June 2019 that “tritiated water vapor represents a significant risk to those exposed to it, as its dose consequence to an exposed individual is 15,000 to 20,000 times higher than that for an equivalent amount of tritium gas.”

/https://www.dnfsb.gov/sites/default/files/document/18481/Recommendation%2020192%2C%20Safety%20of%20the%20Savannah%20River%20Tritium%20Facilities%20%5B2019-200-020%5D.pdf

With a specific activity of 9,619 curies per gram, tritium emits, as it decays, nearly 400 trillion energetic disintegrations per second. William H. McBride, Professor of radiation oncology at the UCLA Medical School, describes ionizing radiation disintegrations as “explosive packages of energy” that are “highly efficient at forming complex, potentially lethal DNA double strand breaks.”

Source:  William MacBride, UCLA School of Medicine Vice Chair for Research in Radiation, Principal Investigator of UCLA’s Center for Medical Countermeasures Against Radiation — National Institutes of Health, Jan 27, 2014.

 “No matter how it is taken into the body,”  states a fact sheet, from the Energy Departments’ Argonne National Laboratory, “tritium is uniformly distributed through all biological fluids within one to two hours.” During that brief time, the DNFSB points out that “the combination of a rapid intake and a short biological half-life means a large fraction of the radiological dose is acutely delivered within hours to days…” McBride underscored this concern, stating that, “damage to DNA can occur within minutes to hours.”

August 10, 2023 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | radiation, Reference