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That 12 days is not a half life, but it is how long it stays in the body before you pee it out. This only matters if you had a single incident of drinking the water or eating contaminated food not if you are constantly exposed to it then each time you consume affected foods you know it stays with you for about 12 days and small part of it stays with you forever as your body doesn't see the difference between tritium and hydrogen, so it will be happy to use the radioactive version, which could increase your chances of cancer as well as your future generations.
I don't want to be insulting, but what you've described is exactly what a half life is.
But like I said, drinking a liter of this water is much less dangerous radiologically than eating a banana, and drinking a liter of sea water is not going to be good for you either.
When I said half life, I made a mental shortcut that it degrades into harmless compounds.
The 12 days just means how long the body keeps most of tritium.
You are talking how much radiation the water causes and that it is smaller than radiation from banana, and I'm talking that this "banana" stays in your body for 12 days and part of it your body integrates by replacing your hydrogen with its radioactive counterpart.
You work with radiation, but this isn't just about radiation, but also involves organic chemistry and metabolism.
I think the gap between you two is that you are describing the "biological half life" of tritium while using the term "half life" to exclusively refer to the "physical half life". In Health Physics the distinction between the two is very important and generally once you start talking about the effect on people it is best practice to always clarify which one you're talking about.
The biological half life of tritium is also a little more complicated than "12 days", it depends on the form it is in. If inhaled as water vapor it almost immediately gets re-exhaled, whereas if drunk as liquid water it can be ~10 days depending on the person's water turn over (<8 hours if dialysis is used for treatment following extreme exposure) ... tritiated water is one of the few things that you can speed up the elimination of by drinking more water. For tritium bound up in organic molecules and ingested (food/fish) the biological half life can be closer to 40 days.
Yeah, that's why I have concerns about constant tritated waste dumping from an active plant. Not so much in this case. It's a very small amount over a very long time.
Edit: and in regards to it using it as hydrogen, even in that case, the tritium will likely damage whatever it's made into and quickly turn back into water. That's why fully titrated water is so oxidizing. It knocks it's own hydrogen off.