"It could have generated electricity and put it on the grid"
I don't think so. It may be approaching net positive energy production, but ITER was not designed to have that energy converted to electricity, it is lost. There is no way ITER was EVER going to generate electricity. (REF https://www.iter.org/proj/inafewlines)
I take issue to the generalization that short half lives = more danger. That is just not true. Tc-99m is used in diagnostic medicine, it has a half-life of 6 hrs. It does not have more risk than Sr-90 that has a half-life of 29 years.
I am not going to argue with you about this. I am a radiological scientist, not a someone that has read up on Wikipedia.
No one measures radioactivity in moles.
The FGR11 limit on I-129 is 5 uCi and I-131 is 30 uCi, I know it is not the latest and greatest, but the latest and greatest makes use of probabilistic risk models to quantify the increase in chances of getting cancer. this is less helpful in a discussion of personal danger rather than the collective danger.
Where is this a rule of thumb. Its by no way supported by science, nor is it implemented in the regulation of radionuclides.
When it comes to biological uptakes, shorter half-life usually means less dose than longer half-life radionuclides. This is primarily because effective dose calculations integrate the absorbed dose over a persons life (well for the purpose of comparing radiotoxicity they do). So a long-live alpha or beta emitter will be far worse than a short lived gamma, even though the range and energy will likely be much higher for the short lived gamma emitter.
I think that you may have gotten the basics wrong here. 1 Bq of I-129 is exactly same radioactivity as 1 Bq of I-131. Its definition is 1 decay per second. The half-life tells how long you have to wait for a given atom to decay, on average. It is not, as you imply, a biological risk factor.
Furthermore, the chemical process by which iodine is absorbed from the bloodstream by the thyroid is unable to discriminate between isotopes. So their biological relevance is actually identical.
If you want a quick and easy way to compare biological impact to the human body for a given isotope, check out the US Federal Guidance Reports 11 & 12. They have done all the heavy lifting and for a lot of the real nasties, you will actually find that the biological damage is chemical not radiological.
Interestingly, the limit for ingestion if I-129 intake is much lower (indicating a higher biological impact) than I-131 (by a factor of six), primarily BECAUSE it has a long half life. The half life is so long that the clearance rate is basically the biological half-life. Where as the I-131 is so short compared to the biological half-life so within a few months it is gone.
I don't think so. It may be approaching net positive energy production, but ITER was not designed to have that energy converted to electricity, it is lost. There is no way ITER was EVER going to generate electricity. (REF https://www.iter.org/proj/inafewlines)