Misunderstood

There are several things in science that are really misunderstood, like vaccines, microwaves, and GMOs. But one that is really misunderstood is radiation. First, what is radiation? When people talk about radiation or radioactivity, they usually talk about microwaves (which don’t cause cancer), X-rays, a green thing that glows in the dark, the Incredible Hulk, or the song by Imagine Dragons. The actual definition is the emission of high energy particles or waves. This can mean many things, but the two most common are electromagnetic waves (photons), or high energy particles released from decaying atoms. The one that I will be talking about is radioactive atoms (the green things that glow in the dark). This kind of radiation is called nuclear
The radium girls were women who painted radioactive paint on watch hands. As you can imagine, painting tiny watch hands was difficult, so, to keep their brushes thin, they would lick them getting radioactive paint on their lips and in their mouth. Later, they suffered from various health problems (those were radium watches, not the tritium watches used today. It was changed because, unlike tritium, radium decays into radon gas and is toxic to the bones). The nuclear fallout from the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan was gruesome and brutal. When the Chernobyl reactor melted down and caught fire, several brave men had to fight those fires. Their gear, to this day, is so radioactive that they can easily overload a geiger counter (a device that counts radioactive particles). Then there is all of this stuff about the Fukushima waste polluting the pacific ocean and contaminating the fish. Radiation can do many amazing things, but it can also be dangerous. It can cause radiation sickness and DNA mutations like cancer. What happens is that powerful radiation could be strong enough to knock electrons off of atoms. This can destroy DNA and can kill the cell. Sometimes if the right parts of DNA are broken, it could make the cell start multiplying like crazy. This is known as cancer. However the chances of a radioactive particle causing cancer are really small. If one gamma ray hit you, the chances of it causing cancer are not one in a thousand, not one in a million, but one in thirty-quadrillion (1/30,000,000,000,000,000)! The amount of radiation that you would need to receive to get a 100 percent chance of cancer is about 20 sieverts. What about radiation sickness? It will take 5 sieverts of radiation to give a person a 100 percent chance of death by radiation sickness. It takes 5 sieverts will kill a person, but 20 sieverts will cause cancer? This is how