How Is Nuclear Energy Harmful?

Video Transcript

"Hi I'm Steve Jones and I'm going to tell you how radioactivity is harmful. Although we are familiar with radioactivity and it's around us all the time and always has been because they are a naturally radioactive materials there are certain things which happen when the level of radioactivity reaches high levels. One of the problems is that radiation is absorbed by the cells of the body. And this can have two effects, the first one is the cell can actually change in it's structure and it can become aggressive and form cancers. Which can damage the working of your body. The second way is it can actually kill the cells themselves. For example in leukemia, the cells which produce red blood cells in the bone marrow are damaged and can be damaged by radiation and therefore not enough red blood cells are produced and there's an excess of white blood cells. So this is a killer disease. In addition to the radiation damage side, the fact is that most radioactive materials are also very poisonous. But this has nothing to do with radioactivity, this is to do with the fact that they are toxic. Just like lead is toxic but lead is not radioactive. So radioactivity is harmful in these ways and therefore we have to make sure that the levels of radiation in our bodies are maintained at a low level. And obviously one of the problems is when we breath in because if there is radioactivity in the atmosphere and we breath in, the radioactivity is in close proximity to our blood vessels and where the oxygen gets into our blood stream. So this is very dangerous. So radioactive fallout as they call it, this is called fallout and this occurred as a result of the Chernobyl disaster when the Chernobyl radio..nuclear reactor exploded then the fallout actually covered a lot of Europe and many people became ill because of this very close proximity breathing in the radioactive dust. So that is more or less why radioactivity is harmful."