Chernobyl, the miniseries, insinuates that if people in the areas surrounding the catastrophic explosion had kept a supply of potassium iodide tablets on hand and taken them as soon as the disaster occurred, those tablets would have blocked radioactive iodine from flooding the thyroids of people in proximity to the ...

Would iodine have helped Chernobyl?

"The mild iodine deficiency in the region surrounding Chernobyl could ... have affected the radiation dose," they wrote, "by increasing the amount of iodine accumulated and increasing the size of the gland in which it was deposited, and it might also alter the radiation effect itself."

Does iodine help with radiation?

KI (potassium iodide) is a salt of stable (not radioactive) iodine that can help block radioactive iodine from being absorbed by the thyroid gland, thus protecting this gland from radiation injury.