It is like light? Or heat or gas? Or small particles like dust? How does it harm us?
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Everything is made of atoms. Most atoms are stable, and stay what they are forever. The simplest atom is hydrogen, with one proton and one electron. More protons make other atoms. Two protons make helium, six protons make carbon. All atoms more complex than basic hydrogen also contain neutrons, which seem to help those more complex atoms stay stable.
At some point, the balance of forces in an atom, based on how many protons and neutrons they have, just isn’t stable, and there is a chance that the atom will just spontaneously fly apart.
Carbon is a good example. Carbo atoms with 6 protons and 6 neutrons are stable. They stay that way forever, for all intents and purposes. But add two neutrons to a carbon atom, and you get carbon-14, 6 protons and 8 neutrons. That arrangement isn’t stable, and has a 50/50 chance of going wrong about every 6000 years (5730 years, I see when I look it up)
So after 5730 years, half of carbon-14 atoms fall apart and become something else. I really can’t be bothered to look up what they become, because the important part for us here is that when those carbon-14 atoms fall apart, they shoot out a highly energetic particle, and that is where the danger lies.
That highly energetic particle might hit the DNA in one of your cells, and damage it in such a way that your damaged cell becomes a cancer cell.
The danger from carbon-14 is practically zero. The danger from Strontium-90 is huge. Turns out your bones think Strontium-90 is calcium, and knits Strontium-90 right into your bones, where that Strontium-90 shoots high-energy particles into your bone marrow, damages the white blood cells your bone marrow produces, and gives you leukemia.
When Chernobyl melted down in 1986, so much Strontium-90 was released that dairy farmers all over Europe dumped all their milk for months because the milk would have been leukemia in a bottle.
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