I'm Justin Rowland and you're listening to Business Daily.

Today we'll be discussing something that generates a really deep-seated fear.

Nuclear radiation.

Why? Because the world needs all the low-carbon energy it can get.

We worry about nuclear power because of the fear of radiation.

But are we more anxious than we should be?

That's all coming up here on Business Daily.

I'm standing on one of London's most famous landmarks, Tower Bridge.

It's not somewhere you'd immediately associate with

radioactivity, not like, say, Fukushima or the Bikini Atoll. But bear with me. Because the truth is

that radioactivity is everywhere. We're exposed to it every day. One of the most radioactive places

in Britain is the county of Cornwall. Cornwall

contains a lot of granite. Granite contains uranium and uranium emits the radioactive gas radon.

And Tower Bridge, where I'm standing now, is clad in Cornish Granite. Now, I'm not worried that if I stand here too long, I'll get cancer.

The fumes from the passing traffic probably pose a bigger cancer threat than the stone here.

But it does raise some interesting questions.

If our bodies are exposed to radiation all the time without serious consequence,

then why does radiation

make us so scared? Well, perhaps the event that encapsulates the fear of nuclear energy more than any

other was the 1986 explosion of reactor number four at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station in Soviet

Ukraine. It had a plume of radioactive material all across northern Europe

and led to fears of thousands of future deaths from cancer.

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