|Dude with Awesome Beard, Freaking Out|
Since we are all really freaked out by the ongoing trouble with Japan's Fukushima nuclear power plant and the hazards posed to the Japanese population by escaped nuclear radiation, let's figure out what nuclear radiation is, and let's begin by talking about radiation in general. The word radiation is used to describe any type of particle or wave that is moving through space really fast, which encompasses lots of things. The kind of radiation that will be most familiar to you is LIGHT, which is a kind of electromagnetic radiation.
|Electromagnetic Radiation, so-named because it consists of electric and magnetic waves that fly through space together.|