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Iodine-129 applications

¹²⁹I is used as a tracer substance to help determine the impact of nuclear reactions on neighboring surroundings. ¹²⁹I is biophilic and therefore is often concentrated in plants or soils with a high organic content.

¹²⁹I can be used in the identification of very old waters by correlating the amount of natural ¹²⁹I or its ¹²⁹Xe decay product. It can also be used in the identification of younger bodies of water due to the increased anthropogenic ¹²⁹I levels due to nuclear reaction fallout. The following is a list of applications of ¹²⁹I analysis:

• estimation of groundwater residence time
• tracing of brine migration
• identification of hydrocarbon source rocks
• tracing the movement of radioactive contaminant plumes

¹²⁹I is a naturally occurring radioactive isotope of iodine with a half-life of 15.7 million years. Although it occurs naturally in the environment, ¹²⁹I is formed more abundantly during the fission of uranium and/or plutonium in nuclear energy reactors and the detonation of nuclear weapons. Iodine itself is a non-metallic element, a purplish-black crystalline solid with the rare physical property of sublimation in which the substance can go directly from a solid state to a gaseous state.

Extraction procedure

¹²⁹I extraction from aqueous samples follows modified procedure of the one outlined by J. Kleinberg and G. Cowan, The Radiochemistry of Fluorine, Chlorine, Bromine, Iodine, Los Alamos National Laboratory where the final product precipitated as AgI is pressed into a target and analyze on the HVE 3MV Tandetron.