Radioactive materials are used for diagnostic radiology, radiation medicine, and radiopharmaceuticals. Radiation hazards also exist wherever radioactive materials are stored or radioactive waste products are discarded. Fires involving radioactive materials can result in widespread contamination.

What happens if you breathe in radioactive particles or swallow contaminated food or water? Inhaling or swallowing radioactive material delivers the source of radiation directly to your cells, increasing the risk of cancer developing in the tissues where they accumulate.

Radiation can damage the body’s internal chemistry, breaking up chemical bonds in our tissue, killing cells, and damaging DNA, which may lead to cancer. In very high doses, radiation can cause sickness and death within hours.

Radiation cannot be spread from person to person. Small quantities of radioactive materials occur naturally in the air, drinking water, food and our own bodies. People also can come into contact with radiation through medical procedures, such as X-rays and some cancer treatments.

People who are externally contaminated with radioactive material can contaminate other people or surfaces that they touch. The body fluids (blood, sweat, urine) of an internally contaminated person can contain radioactive materials. Coming in contact with these body fluids can result in contamination and/or exposure.

Contrary to reports that the three divers died of radiation sickness as a result of their action, all three survived. Shift leader Borys Baranov died in 2005, while Valery Bespalov and Oleksiy Ananenko, both chief engineers of one of the reactor sections, are still alive and live in the capital, Kiev.

Unexpectedly, we also showed that radiation to the thyroid gland from ingesting radioactive iodine within two months after the Chernobyl accident by children and adolescents could lead to development of non-cancer thyroid diseases, such as thyroid follicular adenoma, thyroid benign nodules, and hypothyroidism.

The 1986 accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine, then part of the former Soviet Union, is the only accident in the history of commercial nuclear power to cause fatalities from radiation. It was the product of a severely flawed Soviet-era reactor design, combined with human error.