Not enough people are going crazy about the radiation in Iron Lung, SO I WILL!
The camera shoots such high powered x rays that a direct blast through non-hindering air dealt a lethal dose of radiation to Jack the welder standing right in front of it. It didn't immediately kill him, but it immediately made him vomit and just days later he couldn't stand on his own anymore.
Sure David must've mis-wired it (to the constant power source of the black box instead of to the engine power like everything else) but he insists Simon is not being blasted with any radiation inside the sub because Jack's a really good welder. But, well, unless the sub's entire lining is perfectly welded lead that isn't broken up in any way (say, by a porthole made of glass, undersea pressure, or blunt force trauma), the quality of welding doesn't really matter! Not in Simon's case!
Even if the sub mostly protects him from the X-rays, the number of exposures would still poison him eventually. The X-ray techs at a hospital go to stand in a different room when they push the button bc the radiation they'd be exposed to in a day is magnitudes more than you get having your arm x-rayed once.
For those that missed it, there's a glimpse of a page in the manuals that actually mentions X-ray radiation compounding in the sub with each use, implying it should be used more sparingly even if you don't know anything about dosage. Also implying either David lied or didn't expect Simon to take so many pictures.
Simon points out the temperature a lot at the beginning. Radiation causes heat.
You remember what radiation also causes? Radiation poisoning and radiation burns.
Poisoning typically starts with the nausea vomiting and becomes internal bleeding, radiation burns, fever, aplastic anemia, dizziness, and confusion. Burns start as inconsistent skin redness, then blistering, ulceration, and peeling/sloughing off. Rapid lethal doses (relative to your body, not an ocean of blood or a giant alien monster) don't cause cancer - they destroy the DNA in your cells so that they can't function and can't reproduce, meaning that once the tissues die, they won't grow back. Assuming the whole body is equally irradiated, if your organs don't dissolve or you don't bleed out first, you fall apart. And you lose your mind from one cause or another.
This is without even considering the amount of radiation that camera is putting into the blood ocean. Wonder how the monster feels after being blasted with it so many times. For all we know, the monster is just in pain and pissed off, but not dying.
Depending on how rapidly a given creature's cells reproduce/repair, surviving the radiation poisoning can lead to cancer in an uncertain amount of time. That's when damaged and mutated DNA can't be properly identified/repaired/destroyed by the body and are allowed to reproduce, which leads to tumors. Cancer Stem Cells, which show up in tumors and circulatory system cancers (blood and lymph cancers), lead to metastasis and lethality.
By the way, hey did you know that the way deer grow their antlers so quickly every year is basically by utilizing cancer mechanisms? Antlers that shed are basically bone cancer tumors made from unique stem cells, grown on a tight leash, with velvet supplying the blood and nutrients until they're done. Timelapses of roots/plants growing always makes me think of cancer antlers :)
Did you know plants grow from the tips of their roots and stems because the tips ("meristems") are made of stem cells that don't experience aging? Did you know almost every cell in fungi can be considered a stem cell? And fungi are basically like animal cells with their movement nerfed by having cell walls. Did you know slime molds (not fungi or plants but protists, an entirely different Kingdom) can live as single celled organisms and also join each other into hive minds with no cell membranes between them? Did you know that mature red blood cells don't have nuclei of their own?
Cuz that's what I'm thinking about.
