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The right answer is sadly, "too many to count" in the US. In France, it does not happen often, although a few times we hear of accidents where radiation enters the wrong rooms and contaminate a worker or two. No death though. There were some in Japan a few years ago.

Also note that water-cooled reactors continuously release little amount of tritium in the atmosphere as part of their normal operation (the reasoning being that tritium is short lived and flows quickly through living organism, so it is safer to dilute it quickly and never accumulate large amounts that could blow up in one time, and leak anyway - it's still hydrogen and most metals are porous to hydrogen). One of the origins is neutron capture in the water of primary loop, it is extracted because it must be kept non-radioactive for quicker detection of a real leak from a rod.

Pierre
by Pierre on Wed Jun 28th, 2006 at 05:00:32 AM EST
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The half-life of tritium is 12 years, though there is a tradeoff between radioactivity levels and half-life (the more radioactive the shorter lived, obviously).

One reason tritium may be "safe" to release is that the Earth's gravity cannot retain tritium in the atmosphere. However, I don't know how long it takes for tritium to escape the atmosphere after it's released.

A society committed to the notion that government is always bad will have bad government. And it doesn't have to be that way. — Paul Krugman

by Carrie (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Wed Jun 28th, 2006 at 06:29:33 AM EST
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12 years is quite short as half-lives go for radioactive waste. Also, if ingested as water (THO or T2O), tritium is not as bad as it's high activity shows. Other forms can accumulate in the body and are very dangerous (in older days, clock industry workers were applying phosphorescent paint on numbers, that was tritium-enhanced, with a paint brush they used to lick to keep the hair straight, and they had terrible cancers... may be the clock bloggers could dig more detailed stories).
But water in the body actually has a pretty high turnover so it only remains for a few days and concentrates in no particular organs. I was surprised to see in biology labs, that tritium as a tracer is classed rather low in the danger/confinement scale compared to many industrial chemicals used to voluntarily damage DNA in experiments.

Pierre
by Pierre on Wed Jun 28th, 2006 at 07:37:47 AM EST
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(in older days, clock industry workers were applying phosphorescent paint on numbers, that was tritium-enhanced, with a paint brush they used to lick to keep the hair straight, and they had terrible cancers... may be the clock bloggers could dig more detailed stories)
I would chalk that one to metal or polycyclic hydrocarbon poisoning, actually, but I am just guessing.

A society committed to the notion that government is always bad will have bad government. And it doesn't have to be that way. — Paul Krugman
by Carrie (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Wed Jun 28th, 2006 at 07:44:45 AM EST
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the tritium had to be bound in a molecule.  

Nothing easier:  Just sustitute tritium for hydrogen in whatever compound you are making the paint out of.  

Suppose THAT persists in the body.  Then the tritium persists right along with it for maximal radiological effect.  

The Fates are kind.

by Gaianne on Thu Jul 6th, 2006 at 01:34:31 AM EST
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Well, measured in Becquerels radioactivity is inversely proportional to lifetime. But more relevant to how dangerous something is how energetic the radiation is, and how penetrant. And then we get into its lifetime in the body.

A society committed to the notion that government is always bad will have bad government. And it doesn't have to be that way. — Paul Krugman
by Carrie (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Wed Jun 28th, 2006 at 08:21:45 AM EST
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