How does nuclear radiation kill you?
December 22, 2024 11:07 AM   Subscribe

The Big One goes off, you're soaked in rads, and now you're going to die. But what, medically speaking, is happening to you?
posted by Lemkin to Science & Nature (14 answers total) 4 users marked this as a favorite
 
Radiation sickness (Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic)
Acute radiation syndrome (Centers for Disease Control)
High radiation doses (Nuclear Regulatory Commission)
Q&A with a radiation exposure expert (UCSF interview, 2019)
posted by box at 11:40 AM on December 22, 2024 [1 favorite]


There's lots of different ways, depending on intensity and duration of exposure. Some take hours, some take decades. You may enjoy reading about the Demon Core and how a guy messed around with it and killed himself (25 days later) and another guy (33 years later). And the best part is, they kept fucking around with it for shits and giggles, and killed more people the next year! Also with a huge range from exposure to death, from 9 days to several decades.

(I don't think there's any problem with asking a question without googling it. Nobody is compelled to answer, and the whole point of this site is that we are better than google (and moreso each day!))
posted by SaltySalticid at 11:43 AM on December 22, 2024 [22 favorites]


(fair, protip withdrawn)
posted by j_curiouser at 11:55 AM on December 22, 2024 [5 favorites]


Are you only interested in death from radiation? There are a couple of (horrifying, can’t unread them now I guess) short stories that talk about ways individual people might die in a nuclear detonation.

Douglas Coupland’s “Polaroids from the Dead,” part 2 “The Dead Speak”.

John Varley’s “The Manhattan Phone Book (Abridged).”

You will not enjoy them, but they contain past-tense anecdotes about how people could die.
posted by chesty_a_arthur at 12:02 PM on December 22, 2024 [2 favorites]


Response by poster: Are you only interested in death from radiation?

For the purposes of the question: Yes.

The other kinds of near-term deaths seem medically self-explanatory.
posted by Lemkin at 12:11 PM on December 22, 2024


Cell death and cancers, (in the longer term).

And some of one's cells are important to staying alive.
posted by Windopaene at 12:14 PM on December 22, 2024 [1 favorite]


From my YouTube history, the most radioactive man in history. Warning that this video has stayed with me.
posted by warriorqueen at 12:23 PM on December 22, 2024 [2 favorites]


Here's how it was described in HBO's Chernobyl, although this explanation was for the folks who had been working insanely close to the exploded reactor (I'm assuming here that the show had reasonable cause to provide a reasonable degree of accuracy).
posted by 7 Minutes of Madness at 12:34 PM on December 22, 2024 [1 favorite]


Best answer: *Very* simplified but not gross:

DNA is more fragile during cell replication. Radiation can either damage DNA a little so there's an increased chance of replication errors as time passes, or a lot so the replication just fails (dead cell instead of two live cells).

"Increased chance of replication errors", if it kills you, is "eventually one of those errors became cancerous, and the cancer killed you".

Killing enough cells in one organ will kill you faster. Two ways: either lots of the kind of radiation that goes through bodies, killing all the cells that were dividing just then. Some parts of the body regenerate, replicate, their cells constantly (e.g., linings of the gut, of the lungs; bone marrow), so those are the organs that get damaged right away. The demon core mostly did this.

There's also radiation that carries enough energy to break DNA but doesn't go through solids well, not even dead skin. That will kill people if they ingest particle sources, thus putting the short-distance radiation right at those live gut and lung linings that are always replicating and vulnerable. This is what "depleted uranium" does when used in war, blown up, and incorporated into soil.
posted by clew at 12:55 PM on December 22, 2024 [8 favorites]


If you're up for a podcast-length explanation, This Podcast Will Kill You ep 53 covers radiation in detail. Transcript here if you just want to read the biological impact part, starting p. 11.
posted by gingerbeer at 4:48 PM on December 22, 2024 [1 favorite]


Mod note: One removed, and I'm noting that posters do not need to search elsewhere first before asking here!
posted by taz (staff) at 10:39 PM on December 22, 2024 [9 favorites]


Two small addendums to clew's excellent answer:

Radiation can do awful damage a lot of different tissues, but in the case of prompt radiation (i.e. exposure to a lot of radiation in a single event, rather than chronic exposure to radioactive materials) the main thing that kills patients is the breakdown of their bone marrow. Red blood cells only live for about 4 months, which means that our bodies are dependent on a constant stream of new red blood cells from our bone marrow, and bone marrow is also one of the most vulnerable tissues to radiation damage. This results in an eerie "dead man walking" effect where patients like Louis Slotkin (who carried out the demon core demonstration) feel more or less ok immediately after exposure, but gradually deteriorate over days and weeks as their damaged tissues fail to regenerate themselves. Modern medicine can do a lot to compensate for damaged digestive tracts and lungs, but there's no way to keep a patient alive if their blood just can't carry enough oxygen to keep their heart and brain working.

Also, depleted uranium is slightly radioactive, but it's actually less radioactive than natural uranium, because it's depleted by removing the unstable isotope U-235 for use in reactors and bombs, leaving behind the more stable (and thus less radioactive) U-238. The main danger with depleted uranium is that it's very chemically reactive and it produces a bunch of nasty toxic chemicals when it reacts, to the point that it's very hard to study the effect of the radiation exposure from depleted uranium in sort of the same way it would be hard to study the effects of lead toxicity in gunshot victims. It's just hard to distinguish the signal from the noise in patients that have a lot of very bad things happening in their bodies right now.
posted by firechicago at 10:53 AM on December 23, 2024 [6 favorites]


I'm going to briefly and cautiously add that it depends on ground level or air burst, whether fall-out (radioactive dirt etc) is heavy or light, whether person(s) had immediate access to clean water shower and scrubbed (as much as practical) every square inch including some internal orifices, and avoided ingesting irradiated food. I did not read every link, so maybe this was covered by other answers.
posted by forthright at 11:23 AM on December 23, 2024


For some real-world examples of terrible outcomes, I highly recommend science educator Kyle Hill's Half-life Histories.
posted by canine epigram at 11:43 AM on December 23, 2024


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