Radiation poisoning in fiction

Radiation poisoning, also called "radiation sickness", is a form of damage to organ tissue due to excessive exposure to ionizing radiation. It has been portrayed frequently in fiction.

*In ' a man reported at the police that he self was murdered by a "luminous toxin".
*On the Beach is a post-apocalyptic end-of-the-world novel written by British (later Australian) author Nevil Shute, made into a movie in 1959 and a television movie in 2000. It depicts the lives of various people in Australia awaiting the arrival of a deadly radioactive cloud from a nuclear war in the northern hemisphere.
*Alas, Babylon is a 1959 novel by Pat Frank taking a what-if look at possible effects of nuclear war on people in the fictional community of Fort Repose, Florida.
* In the 1990 NBC television movie Hiroshima: Out of the Ashes, several persons are depicted as having radiation sickness, first, Father Siemens discovers that an apparently uninjured Japanese teenage girl has died suddenly, later, one of a pair of Japanese women, either sisters or related by marriage, is shown progressively dying of radiation sickness, first with hair falling out, and finally being brought to medical attention by the pregnant sister.
* In the 1982 movie Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Spock plays a critical role in saving the crew of the Enterprise, and suffers radiation poisoning.
* The 1983 film Testament follows a suburban family coping with radiation sickness after Soviet nuclear attacks on San Francisco and the continental United States.
* The 1983 film The Day After portrays the aftereffects of a global nuclear war between the US and the USSR, focusing mainly on the residents of Lawrence, Kansas. Various characters are shown dying of radiation poisoning, in particular showing hair loss and baldness. Because actor Jason Robards played the lead role, it popularly got called "Jason Robards' disease."
* The 1983 film Silkwood portrayed Karen Silkwood, a metallurgy worker at a plutonium processing plant.
* Mick Jackson's 1984 TV movie Threads follows two Sheffield families and their children through the aftermath of a Soviet nuclear attack. Many characters are shown dying of radiation poisoning, cancers and deformity. Those who survive are shown aging prematurely.
* The writers of the BBC television drama serial Edge of Darkness (1985) researched the effects of radiation poisoning and made sure that the two main characters in question, Ronald Craven (Bob Peck) and Darius Jedburgh (Joe Don Baker), exhibited realistic symptoms. After being exposed to lethal levels of radiation in a secret underground hot cell, both characters experience fatigue, vomiting and delirium before being able to continue working during a brief latency period. One other character, Emma Craven, was exposed to a lesser dose and is seen checking her hair to see if any of it was falling out. Another character, Jerry Grogan, is exposed to a lethal dose during a criticality accident, and is falling ill as the serial finishes.
* Shohei Imamura's 1989 movie Black Rain (é»’ã?„é›¨; kuroi ame) deals with the aftermath of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. The title refers to the "black rain" of radioactive fallout that fell on Hiroshima after the bombing. It is based on the book of the same name by Ibuse Masuji.
* The events of the 1988 pilot episode of the BBC TV series Red Dwarf (and first few chapters of the 1990 book Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers) include the entire crew of the vessel being killed in a criticality accident after Rimmer failed to reseal a drive plate correctly. Only Lister (being stored in a penal time stasis field) and his pregnant cat (concealed in the cargo bay) survived. The fallout takes precisely 3,000,000 years to become safe.
* 1989's Fat Man and Little Boy is the dramatization of American efforts to construct the first nuclear weapon, during World War II. Scientist Michael Merriman, played by John Cusack, was exposed to a lethal dose of ionizing radiation while tickling the dragon's tail resulting in a criticality accident. Merriman is shown before his death, in graphic scenes. The character of Merriman was based on Louis Slotin, who died after an identical accident at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
* In the television series 24s second season, major character George Mason inhales a fatal amount of airborne plutonium. The effects on his health are shown on an hour-by-hour basis. He becomes very ill and faces imminent death.
* In the graphic novel When the Wind Blows by Raymond Briggs, an elderly couple is exposed to fallout after a nuclear war. Much of the second half of the story deals with the effects of radiation poisoning on them and how they interpret what is happening to them. Oblivious to the true danger they are in, they put most of the symptoms they are suffering from down to shock and stress.
* In the television series Stargate SG-1, the character Daniel Jackson is exposed to a massive dose of radiation (approximately 12 Sv) while disarming an experimental nuclear weapon on another planet. Allowed to return to his home planet on compassionate grounds (he was accused of sabotage), he quickly succumbs to the symptoms of radiation poisoning, eventually only cheating death by ascending to a higher plane of existence
*In the television series "Stargate Atlantis", an Teyla Emmagen had visions of an ancient pilot. He had been exposed to deadly levels of radiation from that Solar System's sun. He exhibited burns over his entire body.
* A "twinned" copy of John Crichton, in the scifi series Farscape, suffered fatal radiation exposure during a wormhole activation, dying within a matter of hours. Symptoms included reddened complexion, nausea, pain and lethargy.
* The 1999 time-travel TV series 7 Days features an episode in the first season involving a radiation leak from a damaged Russian nuclear submarine. When asked to describe the size of the leak, one scientist explains, "The phrase 'radioactive death cloud' comes to mind." Victims are pictured as pale and sickly.
* The 2002 film K-19: The Widowmaker shows the events of Soviet submarine K-19, where eight crew members experience acute radiation poisoning (spending 10 to 20 minutes repairing the coolant system of the reactor); the film is based on real events. They immediately experienced vomiting and nausea, became extremely ill, and died within a week. Some of the remaining crew members suffer minor symptoms.
* The German short film Tag 26 portrays the life of two survivors after a non-descript nuclear disaster, one of whom's protective radiation suits is pierced. After sealing the hole it is revealed the very small amount of time he was exposed to the contaminated air was enough to cause a blood test taken immediately after his accident to show that he had radiation poisoning. He decides a slow death in his suit is not preferable to a relatively quick one in the open air and removes the suit.
* In the first season of War of the Worlds, host bodies to the aliens, who need radiation to negate the presence of bacteria, are often featured with sores to reflect the damage the radiation is doing to the human body (a novelisation of the pilot episode went further with the sickness as their clothes were stained by feces and vomit).
* In the 2002 film The Sum of All Fears, an Arab man and his son find an atomic bomb in the Sinai desert that was lost when an Israeli bomber was shot down in the early days of the 1973 Arab-Israeli Yom Kippur War. The bomb had been buried there for nearly 30 years. When they uncover it they notice that the side is dented and the interior partially exposed. The man reaches inside and notes that it is warm. Later the man is shown dying from acute radiation poisoning as he is being questioned by a US intelligence agent.
* The Russian movie Dead Man's Letters describes the life and struggle of survivors in a post-apocalyptic world. While the open end leaves room for speculation, most characters gradually die due to the lethal radiation. The movie dates 1986, the year of the Chernobyl accident.
* The computer game Fallout deals extensively with radiation effects and treatment. The protagonist travels across post-nuclear California, encountering numerous radiation-induced mutations and highly radioactive zones. Unless special precautions are taken, the player character suffers from increasingly severe syndromes of radiation sickness and eventually dies.
* In the computer game S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Shadow of Chernobyl you play a character who was left with amnesia in a city outside "The Exclusion Zone" as described by the cordoned area of Chornobyl and Pripyat by Ukrainian military. Your character must drink Vodka, get a better suit, or take a special dose of chemical to offset the effects of radiation.
*In the docu-drama , shown on RTÉ, people on a fishing trip in the Irish Sea are exposed to a high level of radiation from an accident at Sellafield. The fisherman are shown bleeding from their mouths, ears and noses. Two of them die within a year while another is shown suffering from radiation poisoning in a hospital.
* In the television series Battlestar Galactica the humans left on Caprica after the Cylon nuclear attack must receive constant injections of anti-radiation doses in order to survive and avoid radiation sickness; also, in the episode 'The Passage', one of the pilots died from radiation poisoning.
* Robert C. O'Brien's young adult book Z For Zachariah is set in a small small American town after a nuclear holocaust. The town's location in a remote valley shelters it from the nuclear fallout. Anne Burden, a teenage girl, nurses a scientist Dr Loomis back to health after he accidentally contaminates himself by bathing in a river. He becomes sick and delirious with poisoning revealing he committed murder in his delirious state.
* In the television series Jericho, a mysterious man seemingly coming from Denver arrives in Jericho with serious radiation poisoning and burns, with external injuries obvious. The man ultimately dies after being awakened for questioning by Jericho residents.
* In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Thine Own Self", the residents of an alien village are infected with radiation poisoning after Data, suffering from amnesia, appears carrying radioactive probe fragments. The theme of this episode parallels the actual events of the Goiânia accident.
*Wolves Eat Dogs is a novel by Martin Cruz Smith, partially set in the fallout zone around Chernobyl,Ukraine in the year 1996. It deals extensively with radiation and radiation poisoning.
*In the novel The Stand, by Stephen King, late stage radiation poisoning from exposure to a nuclear weapon is shown in the Trashcan Man after he carts a nuclear warhead for days through the desert.
* In a fifth episode of the second season of the medical drama , a boy is killed by radiation poisoning received from a piece of scrap.
* In the episode "Dead Woman Walking" from the television series CSI: Miami; Belle King, an attorney-at-law is found to have ingested massive amounts of iodine-131, a radioactive isotope used to treat cancer patients, in fresh squeezed orange juice she was receiving in lieu of full payment from a client. She was being eaten up from the inside and had less than a week to live as the team rallies to find the poisoner before she dies.
* In the episode "To Loose the Fateful Lightning" from the television series Andromeda, Dylan Hunt (captain of the Andromeda) encounters a Highguard space station inhabited by the descendants of the original crew. The inhabitants are all young, no older than 20 years old or so, because they have been exposed to the fictional radioactive element voltarium from Nova bombs stored inside one of the hangars. Each successive generation died younger and younger.

* In the Babylon 5 episode "All Alone in the Night", Lt. Ramirez's starship is badly damaged during a fight with a new alien race, and he is exposed to a lethal dose of radiation. He is shown struggling through the effects of acute radiation syndrome to carry news of the battle to the station, and dies shortly after delivering his message.

*In the American drama television series Heroes, the character Ted Sprague accidentally killed his wife through radiation poisoning.

*In an episode of Chilly Beach, Frank begins getting radiation poisoning while working on a nuclear bomb to give to a UN WMD inspection team. He gives the bomb away before he can get late-stage radiation poisoning, and is ultimately alright.

*In the TV series 's first season, a fire at a lab traps a scientist in a radioactive lab. Johnny and Roy rescue the man, who receives 405 REM of radiation from exposure to Cobalt-60 and Iodine-131. It is unknown whether or not he survived.

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