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Radionuclide therapy uses radioactive substances called radiopharmaceuticals to treat medical conditions, particularly cancer. These are introduced into the body by various means and localise to specific locations, organs or tissues depending on their properties and administration routes. This includes anything from a simple compound such as sodium iodide that locates to the thyroid via trapping the iodide ion, to complex biopharmaceuticals such as recombinant antibodies which are attached to radionuclides and seek out specific antigens on cell surfaces.
Nuclear fission products are the atomic fragments left after a large atomic nucleus undergoes nuclear fission. Typically, a large nucleus like that of uranium fissions by splitting into two smaller nuclei, along with a few neutrons, the release of heat energy, and gamma rays. The two smaller nuclei are the fission products..
Potassium iodide is a chemical compound, medication, and dietary supplement. It is a medication used for treating hyperthyroidism, in radiation emergencies, and for protecting the thyroid gland when certain types of radiopharmaceuticals are used. In the third world it is also used for treating skin sporotrichosis and phycomycosis. It is a supplement used by people with low dietary intake of iodine. It is administered orally.
Iodine-131 is an important radioisotope of iodine discovered by Glenn Seaborg and John Livingood in 1938 at the University of California, Berkeley. It has a radioactive decay half-life of about eight days. It is associated with nuclear energy, medical diagnostic and treatment procedures, and natural gas production. It also plays a major role as a radioactive isotope present in nuclear fission products, and was a significant contributor to the health hazards from open-air atomic bomb testing in the 1950s, and from the Chernobyl disaster, as well as being a large fraction of the contamination hazard in the first weeks in the Fukushima nuclear crisis. This is because 131I is a major fission product of uranium and plutonium, comprising nearly 3% of the total products of fission. See fission product yield for a comparison with other radioactive fission products. 131I is also a major fission product of uranium-233, produced from thorium.
There are 37 known isotopes of iodine (53I) from 108I to 144I; all undergo radioactive decay except 127I, which is stable. Iodine is thus a monoisotopic element.
The Chernobyl disaster began on 26 April 1986 with the explosion of the No. 4 reactor of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, near the city of Pripyat in the north of the Ukrainian SSR, close to the border with the Byelorussian SSR, in the Soviet Union. It is one of only two nuclear energy accidents rated at seven—the maximum severity—on the International Nuclear Event Scale, the other being the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan. The initial emergency response and subsequent mitigation efforts involved more than 500,000 personnel and cost an estimated 18 billion roubles—roughly US$68 billion in 2019, adjusted for inflation. It is considered the worst nuclear disaster in history.
The 1986 Chernobyl disaster triggered the release of radioactive contamination into the atmosphere in the form of both particulate and gaseous radioisotopes. As of 2022, it was the world's largest known release of radioactivity into the environment.
This page discusses each of the main elements in the mixture of fission products produced by nuclear fission of the common nuclear fuels uranium and plutonium. The isotopes are listed by element, in order by atomic number.
Chernobyl liquidators were the civil and military personnel who were called upon to deal with the consequences of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster in the Soviet Union on the site of the event. The liquidators are widely credited with limiting both the immediate and long-term damage from the disaster.
Strontium-90 is a radioactive isotope of strontium produced by nuclear fission, with a half-life of 28.8 years. It undergoes β− decay into yttrium-90, with a decay energy of 0.546 MeV. Strontium-90 has applications in medicine and industry and is an isotope of concern in fallout from nuclear weapons, nuclear weapons testing, and nuclear accidents.
Iodine-123 (123I) is a radioactive isotope of iodine used in nuclear medicine imaging, including single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) or SPECT/CT exams. The isotope's half-life is 13.2230 hours; the decay by electron capture to tellurium-123 emits gamma radiation with a predominant energy of 159 keV. In medical applications, the radiation is detected by a gamma camera. The isotope is typically applied as iodide-123, the anionic form.
The TORCH report was a health impacts report requested by the European Greens in 2006, for the twentieth anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, in reply to the 2006 report of the Chernobyl Forum which was criticized by some advocacy organizations opposed to nuclear energy such as Greenpeace.
This article compares the radioactivity release and decay from the Chernobyl disaster with various other events which involved a release of uncontrolled radioactivity.
The Chernobyl Forum is the name of a group of UN agencies, founded on 3–5 February 2003 at the IAEA Headquarters in Vienna, to scientifically assess the health effects and environmental consequences of the Chernobyl accident and to issue factual, authoritative reports on its environmental and health effects.
The Chernobyl disaster, considered the worst nuclear disaster in history, occurred on 26 April 1986 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, then part of the Soviet Union, now in Ukraine. From 1986 onward, the total death toll of the disaster has lacked consensus; as peer-reviewed medical journal The Lancet and other sources have noted, it remains contested. There is consensus that a total of approximately 30 people died from immediate blast trauma and acute radiation syndrome (ARS) in the seconds to months after the disaster, respectively, with 60 in total in the decades since, inclusive of later radiation induced cancer. However, there is considerable debate concerning the accurate number of projected deaths that have yet to occur due to the disaster's long-term health effects; long-term death estimates range from up to 4,000 for the most exposed people of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, to 16,000 cases in total for all those exposed on the entire continent of Europe, with figures as high as 60,000 when including the relatively minor effects around the globe. Such numbers are based on the heavily contested linear no-threshold model.
The radiation effects from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster are the observed and predicted effects as a result of the release of radioactive isotopes from the Fukushima Daiichii Nuclear Power Plant following the 2011 Tōhoku 9.0 magnitude earthquake and tsunami. The release of radioactive isotopes from reactor containment vessels was a result of venting in order to reduce gaseous pressure, and the discharge of coolant water into the sea. This resulted in Japanese authorities implementing a 30-km exclusion zone around the power plant and the continued displacement of approximately 156,000 people as of early 2013. The number of evacuees has declined to 49,492 as of March 2018. Radioactive particles from the incident, including iodine-131 and caesium-134/137, have since been detected at atomospheric radionuclide sampling stations around the world, including in California and the Pacific Ocean.
Christoph Reiners is a German nuclear medicine physician and hospital manager. He is a senior professor of the Medical Faculty of the University of Würzburg.
Dr. Yuri Nikiforov is an American scientist who revolutionized the understanding of thyroid cancer, most recently winning a two-year battle in which the World Health Organization has agreed in 2017 to reclassify non-invasive thyroid tumors to non-cancerogenic liaisons. Those tumors typically have some, but not all, characteristics of cancer. The WHO has agreed to change the term for the tumors from Encapsulated Follicular Variant of Papillary Thyroid Carcinoma to Noninvasive Follicular Thyroid Neoplasm With Papillary-like Nuclear Features, or NIFTP. About 45,000 people a year are diagnosed with NIFTP in the world. The decision led to a change in protocol of medical treatment, which no longer required removal of the whole thyroid gland from such patients as well as ended the use of radioactive iodine, extending their life expectancy and quality of life. The patients still undergo surgery, in which their thyroid tumors are removed, typically with half, but not all, of the thyroid gland.
Jacob Robbins was an American endocrinologist known for his research on the thyroid gland. He established the "free thyroxine hypothesis", which holds that thyroxine is only active when not bound to protein, and performed long-term research on the incidence of thyroid cancer caused by radiation in survivors of nuclear fallout.
References
- ↑ Miller, G. Tyler; Spoolman, Scott (2008). Living In The Environment. Belmont, Ontario: Brooks/Cole. p. 390. ISBN 978-0-495-55671-8.
- ↑ Welner, Michael; Page, Jonathan (2013). "Disaster Psychiatry". In Kollek, Daniel (ed.). Disaster Preparedness for Healthcare Facilities. People's Medical Publishing House. pp. 469–499. ISBN 978-1-60795-255-8.
- ↑ Alexis-Martin, Becky (30 June 2015). "The Chernobyl necklace: the psychosocial experiences of female radiation emergency survivors". Belgeo (Belgian Journal of Geography). 2015 (1). doi: 10.4000/belgeo.15875 . Retrieved 15 September 2021.
- ↑ Kronik, Aleksandr A.; Akhmerov, Rashad A.; Speckhard, Anne (December 1999). "Trauma and disaster as life disrupters: A model of computer-assisted psychotherapy applied to adolescent victims of the Chernobyl disaster". Professional Psychology: Research and Practice . 30 (6): 586–599. doi:10.1037/0735-7028.30.6.586.
- 1 2 Bulisova, Gabriela (2005). "Chernobyl Revisited". Ukraine. Archived from the original on 2 April 2012. Retrieved 16 September 2011.
- 1 2 Millar, Sarah (25 March 2011). "A Chernobyl scientist recalls her years spent at the plant". Toronto Star.
- ↑ Alford, Erika Masuda; Hu, Mimi I.; Ahn, Peter; Lamont, Jeffrey P. (25 March 2011). "Thyroid and Parathyroid Cancers". In Pazdur, Richard; Wagman, Lawrence D.; Camphausen, Kevin A.; Hoskins, William J. (eds.). Cancer Management: A Multidisciplinary Approach (13 ed.). Archived from the original on 28 February 2010. Retrieved 16 September 2011.
- ↑ Nocera, Joe (11 July 2011). "Chernobyl's Lingering Scars". The New York Times.
- ↑ Paschyn, Christina Maria (27 April 2011). "Will Women in Japan Wear the "Chernobyl Necklace"?". Ms. Magazine Blog.
- ↑ Mikhailjuk, Valentin (1999). Багряне намисто[The Crimson Necklace]. Kyiv: Institut Narodoznavstva NAN Ukraïni.
- ↑ "Вечір памяті "Чорнобиль стукає в наші серця"" [Evening of Remembrance: "Chernobyl beats in our hearts"]. Publichna Biblioteka Vishnevoї misʹkoї radi (Vyshneve City Council Public Library). 5 May 2011. Retrieved 15 September 2021.