生活之中到处都是辐射

Do you believe, as I used to, that radioactivity is very rare and very dangerous, restricted to arsenals and power plants? Let's take a look at your kitchen. The bananas are radioactive from their potassium, the Brazil nuts have a thousand times more radium than any other food item, and your dried herbs and spices were irradiated to counter bacteria, germination and spoilage. There's thorium in your microwave oven and americium in your smoke detector.
你是否曾经与我一样，相信放射性是非常罕见并且极度危险的东西？并且只有在军工厂和核电站才能觅到它的踪迹？让我们来看看你的厨房吧。由于含有钾元素，香蕉具有放射性；巴西坚果里含有的镭元素是其他食物的上千倍；你的干香草和香料经受过辐射杀菌处理，目的是消灭细菌、抑制萌芽、防止腐败。你的微波炉里有钍元素，而你的烟雾感应器中则有镅元素。

Elsewhere in the house, cat litter, cigarettes, adobe, granite and brick are all actively radiating you. Always and forever, radiation is both raining down on you from the skies -- striking mile-high Denver two to three times as powerfully as San Diego -- and floating up at you from our bedrock's decaying uranium. Those all-natural mineral waters you soaked in on that spa vacation? Did the brochure mention that hot springs are hot in two senses, as the heat emanates from those same uranium combustions?
环顾你家四周，猫沙盆、香烟、土坯、花岗岩和砖块都在永不停歇地辐射你。每时每刻，你不仅会受到来自天空的辐射—高原之城丹佛市受到的辐射是 地亚哥的两至三倍—还会受到来自地下基岩铀衰变的辐射。那么你在温泉假期时享受的全天然矿物质温泉水呢？宣传小册子有没有提到温泉水的热度有两个方面的含义，因为水温就来自于铀衰变所产生的热量？

Radiance is so pervasive that geologists have uncovered evidence of 14 naturally occurring nuclear reactors. It's coming out of the walls of the U.S. Capitol in Washington and New York's Grand Central Terminal. Your cat is radioactive, your dog is radioactive, your friends and your family are all radioactive, and so, as it turns out, are you. Right now your body is emanating radiant effluvia and, every time you and another human being get together, you irradiate each other.
辐射无处不在，地质学家们甚至已经发现了14处天然核反应堆存在的证据。辐射来自于华盛顿国会山和纽约中央车站的 壁之中。你的宠物猫、宠物狗、朋友和家人都具有辐射性。你自己也同样如此。现在，你的身体正释放出生物电，每次你与另外一个人接触时，你们都会互相辐射。

By the way, do you live in the continental U.S.? In 1997, the National Cancer Institute reported that the Cold War detonations at the Nevada Test Site had polluted nearly the whole of the country with drifting airborne radioactive iodine, creating somewhere between 10,000 and 75,000 cases of childhood thyroid cancer. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that of the nearly 600,000 Americans dying of cancer every year, 11,000 will be because of those tests. All those decades worrying about the Soviet Union attacking Americans with nuclear weapons? Instead, while Washington irradiated Americans from Nevada, Moscow irradiated its own citizens with tests from Kazakhstan.
顺便提一句，你是否居住在美国本土？1997年，美国国家癌症研究所(National Cancer Institute)发布的报告称，由于放射性碘在空气中的扩散，冷战时期在内华达试验场(Nevada Test Site)进行的核爆炸试验已经对整个国家构成了污染，并导致了10,000例至75,000例儿童甲状腺癌的出现。据美国疾病控制与预防中心(Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)估计，在每年近600,000名死于癌症的美国人中，有11,000名患者的病因是由内华达的核试验导致的。记不记得在冷战的几十年间对苏联使用核武器攻击美国人的担忧？事实上，美国政府用内华达的核试验辐射了美国人民，而苏联政府则用哈萨克斯坦的核试验辐射了苏联人民。

But there is, in all this, some good news.
但是，尽管如此，我还是有一些好消息。

The source of radioactivity is an atom so obese that it defies the laws of attraction gluing together our material world and spits out little pieces of itself -- two kinds of particles and a stream of gamma rays, similar to X-rays. An overdose of gamma rays is like a vicious sunburn, with skin damage and elevated cancer risks, but those particles are too big to penetrate our skin, meaning that they need to be swallowed or inhaled to wreak damage. Remember the movie 'Silkwood,' with Meryl Streep writhing in naked agony as men with brushes scrubbed her in the shower? They were washing away her exposure. The truly fearful event in a nuclear accident, then, isn't fallout but meltdown, where the core burns through the floor and suffuses the water table. There it causes agricultural mayhem and radioactive dust that you better not breathe.
放射性产生的根源是一个太不稳定的原子违背了万有引力定律（我们物质世界存在的基本原理）并发生分裂，释放出两种粒子和一束类似于X光的γ射线。过量暴露在γ射线中就好像恶性晒伤一样，会造成皮肤损伤并提高罹患癌症的风险，但由于粒子的体积太大，所以它们无法穿透我们的皮肤，也就是说这些粒子要被人类吞入或吸入才会造成损伤。记得电影《丝克伍事件》(Silkwood)吗？在片中，当梅丽尔·斯特里普(Meryl Streep)饰演的角色赤身淋浴时，一些男人用刷子洗刷她，她痛苦地扭曲着身体。这些人正是试图冲刷掉她所受到的辐射。核事故中真正可怕的不是放射性尘埃而是堆芯熔毁，堆芯熔毁能够烧穿地表并渗入地下水。堆芯熔毁可以带来农业灾害和不宜吸入的放射性尘埃。

The good news, though, is in that word: overdose. We're not dropping dead en masse from radiation poisoning or its ensuing cancers on a daily basis because, like all poisons, it isn't the particular atom that will get you. It's the dose. And damage from radioactivity requires a much greater dose than any of us would have believed.
然而，令人欣慰的事情就在于“过量”一词。人类不会因为放射性毒害或由此引发的癌症而每天大量死亡，这是因为与所有的有毒物质一样，罪魁祸首不是特定的原子，而是剂量。放射性造成损伤所需的剂量远远超过我们通常认为的水平。

This upheaval in everything we thought we knew comes from two decadeslong studies. The United Nations spent 25 years investigating the Chernobyl disaster and determined that 57 people died during the accident itself (including 28 emergency workers), while 18 children living nearby died in the following years of thyroid cancer from drinking the milk of tainted cows. (Thyroid cancer is very curable, so their deaths could have been prevented by an effective public-health service, but Ukraine's and Belarus's collapsed alongside the Soviet Union's.) In short, the most terrifying nuclear disaster in human history, which spread a cloud the size of 400 Hiroshimas across the whole of Europe, killed 75 people.
人类对核辐射了解的剧变来源自两项历时数十年的研究。联合国花费25年的时间调查了切尔诺贝利事故，研究结果表明，事故直接导致的死亡人数是57人（其中包括28名抢险工人），另有18名居住在附近的儿童由于饮用了受污染奶牛的奶于事故发生数年中死于甲状腺癌。（甲状腺癌是容易治愈的一种疾病，因此儿童们的死亡本可以通过有效的公共医疗服务避免，但是随着苏联的解体，乌克兰和白俄罗斯的公共医疗服务名存实亡。）简而言之，人类历史上最严重的、放射性尘埃在整个欧洲扩散的面积相当于广岛400倍的核事故最终导致的死亡人数是75人。