Something interesting that I've noticed: I'm a radiographer (take x-rays for a living) and Iron Lung has really made me realise how events like Chernobyl have influenced the common / public understanding of radiation, and by association x-rays.
x-rays are generated from a filament (the first time I heard filament station I was like ??? why name a station after that???) where electrons leave the filament, accelerate across the tube, strike a target and release x-ray photons which leave the x-ray tube as an x-ray beam in the direction the camera is pointing. Whilst there is some 'scatter' radiation that goes off in random directions, including backwards, most of it is focussed in the direction of the beam.
X-ray radiation follows what's called the 'inverse square law', whereby as the distance from the tube doubles, the intensity of the x-ray beam drops by a factor of 4. This means that for medical x-rays, if we go to a ward to take a mobile x-ray, we normally consider a distance of over 2 meters away from the tube to be sufficient for a bystander to receive essentially no radiation. Of course the x-rays Simon was using have much higher exposure factors and greater intensity that medical x-rays (where we have to adhere to ALARP - keep the dose As Low As Reasonably Practicable) but the inverse square law still applies.
X-rays are also attenuated (weakened basically) by interactions with the electrons in whatever medium they travel through, with lead typically being used for radiation shielding bc its high atomic number means there are lots of electrons in lead to increase the chance of interaction between the x-ray photons and the lead electrons.
All this to say, Simon was probably not being as irradiated by the camera as people think; the camera was on the outside of the hull, so there was a little distance between him and the source of the radiation, and the hull and walls of the sub are obviously made of metal, so even if the COI didn't bother installing proper lead or lead equivalent shielding (which they probably didn't...) the metal would offer some degree of protection. The camera was also pointing away from Simon, so he wouldn't have been in the path of the beam and would have been receiving mostly scatter radiation rather than the full blast that Jack received.
The sort of radiation produced by x-ray generators also doesn't linger / build up in objects or surroundings, otherwise hospitals would constantly have to throw everything in x-ray rooms away! Places like Chernobyl are radioactive because nuclear power plants use radioactive isotopes - those things emit their own radiation and hang about forever. Devices like x-ray machines and CT scanners don't actually contain anything innately radioactive in them; they just generate x-rays when a current is run across the tungsten filament. If Simon isn't actively pressing the button to take an image, there is 0 radiation occurring.
However! Whilst a metal sub wouldn't necessarily become irradiated with the amount of x-rays that Simon took, the blood ocean is a far more interesting case! Cells are at their most vulnerable to radiation during mitosis when they're dividing, which means that stem cells (which frequently divide) are very vulnerable to radiation! If we take the blood ocean to be a big biomass which can adapt from its inert state to do things like smoosh researchers together into an eel or meld with a submarine and adapt it to a living thing (maybe like totipotent stem cells having the potential to become anything?), then it was probably Not Enjoying getting blasted by radiation very much. Or maybe it was the total opposite; x-ray beams contain a lot of energy, perhaps the blood ocean is unaffected by the damaging nature of ionising radiation bc of its unknowable nature and it was feeding from the energy of the x-ray photons??
anyway, sorry for rambling, tl;dr neither Simon nor the SM-13 were probably as irradiated as you might think, but radiation could potentially have an effect on the blood ocean?
I really love reading your ideas and analyses, just wanted to contribute something of my own :)
I already came to this conclusion a little while ago but there are some others who might need to see it come from the horse's mouth.
Thanks, Anonymous Radiographer!
I also noticed that all the SM-13 terminal photos are .dcm files. Those are DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine), which are bundled with a bunch of metadata, like parameters, equipment settings, in a higher dynamic range than usual. Absolutely crazy attention to detail!
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