You're asking for a range of more than 8 orders of magnitude. What photo diode are you planning to use? Does it even have nearly this range? A response image of light intensity vs produced current on Wikipedia gives less than one order of magnitude difference. That's not hopeful for your project.
No matter what, you'll have to build some kind of circuit as a photo diode produces current (it's basically a small solar cell), and an ADC needs voltage. So you must provide an appropriate load, such as a resistor, and then measure the resulting voltage.
0.01 NTU, other than that I don't know the unit, doesn't mean much in itself. If you mean that this should be the resolution, at 24-bits you're looking at a range of 0-160,000 NTU.