How bad is radioactive radiation for our health? † What does science say

‘We often find radiation scary because we cannot see, feel or smell it,’ says radiation expert Wout Moerman of Radboudumc. “A lot of people don’t know exactly what it is. To understand that, we need to look at the little building blocks that make up everything around us: atoms. Some of those atoms can radiate, for example if the nucleus of those atoms contains too many particles. There is then a chance that such a superfluous particle will shoot away, which we call radiation. “This happens regularly in nature. Food is also a little radioactive. We call that natural radioactivity”, explains Moerman.