We're going deeper now.
If human skin is exposed to an uncovered Beta-emitter the Beta particles will actually cause more harm than Gamma rays as Beta particles are essentially tiny DNA-wrecking balls compared to Gamma Rays which are more like beams of energy.
Unless you're wearing clothing, which most of us do.
Alpha emitters pose no risk as long as they are not ingested as the particles are so large that the top dead layer of skin is enough to stop them from entering the body and causing damage - but Beta Particles have just enough power to get under the skin and they wreak more havoc than Gamma - that is why all radiation sources need to be handled with gloves - simple thin rubber gloves will stop Beta and Alpha.
I'm not disagreeing with you, but particularly high energy alphas can actually enter the eyeball. It's not something that I'd personally worry about, but there it is. In practice, weak beta emitters like that are probably nothing of concern.
Not all radiation sources need to be handled with gloves. With gamma emitters, it's usually a moot point. If there is a concern about spreading contamination, gloves are obviously an excellent idea.
Gamma is the least dangerous in low dosage compared to the others but it is also the most difficult to contain and in very high dosages is very dangerous.
Technically correct, but a bit of a misnomer. An alpha source is only dangerous when ingested. (Or as previously mentioned, when a powerful enough source is basically placed against an open eye.) Betas are dangerous when close to uncovered skin. Gammas are dangerous when you're within range of them. Yeah, they don't mess things up as much as basically any other form of radiation does, but they can nearly always mess things up to some degree. Gammas are less
damaging than other forms of exposure once they'e entered the body, but they're always entering the body. Context is important here.
The strange thing about Gamma radiation is it does not affect everyone equally, some people, mostly older people, are hardly affected by it at all while younger people are very highly affected - case in point Anatoly Stepanovich Dyatlov, the head engineer of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant had been present at not only the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown but also an earlier nuclear meltdown on a submarine he had been trapped inside - the man had received a radiation exposure so staggeringly massive that 50% of people with similar exposure died within a month and the other 50% died a few years down the line - he not only didn't die he was hardly affected at all and ended up dying at the age of 95 of heart failure completely un-associated with his radiation exposure decades earlier... makes you think.
It's not just gammas either. If I had to take a SWAG at this one, I'd opine that high doses of radiation interfere with cellular division, and the cells in older bodies don't divide as rapidly as they do in younger bodies. Science hasn't adequately explained this one yet, even with our rather large volume of experimental data on the subject.
As for large doses, Harold McCluskey - otherwise known as the Atomic Man - received not only a large acute dose, but also a large chronic dose of radiation when a glove box exploded in his face in 1976, embedding Amercium-141 in his body. He was already an old man suffering from coronary artery disease when this happened, and this dose probably should have killed him, but it didn't. He went on to live another 11 years. At the time of his death, his body would have set off our alarms. He died of that same coronary artery disease. There was no evidence of cancer in his body when he died. The question that I have is did this dose shorten his life, not effect it significantly, or did it actually prolong it by a bit?
I've read that the old folks that have illegally moved back into Pripyat since the Chernobyl incident are doing better medically than they ought to have been otherwise. The wildlife certainly is doing better, but that's to be expected when most of the people leave. It's weird stuff.
