双语新闻:生活处处有辐射

2014-04-25 15:28:58来源：可可英语

　　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。

　　Some believe that this number is too conservative, but those beliefs aren't backed by data. One critic is physicist Bernard Cohen, who predicted, 'The sum of exposures to people all over the world will eventually, after about 50 years, reach 60 billion millirems, enough to cause about 16,000 deaths.' To give this number perspective, around 16,000 Americans die every year from the pollution of coal-burning power plants.

　　有一些人认为，上述数字太过保守，但是他们的论点并没有得到数据的支持。一位批评家是物理学家伯纳德·科恩(Bernard Cohen)，他曾经预言到：“在50年以后，全球所有人类接受的辐射总量将最终达到600亿毫仑目，足以令约16,000人丧生。”我们可以换个角度来看待这个数字，美国每年因火力发电厂污染而导致死亡的人数也高达16,000人。

　　Besides the U.N.'s Chernobyl report, the most extensive data on human exposure to radiation is the American-Japanese joint study of hibakusha -- 'explosion-affected persons' -- the 200,000 survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The expectations at the start of that study (which has taken over 60 years and continues to this day) were that survivorswould be overrun with tumors and leukemia and that a percentage of their descendants would be genetically deformed. Instead, researcher Evan Douple concluded, 'The risk of cancer is quite low, lower than what the public might expect.'

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