I've been wondering since pretty early on in the show if my idea of radioactivity is slightly demonized - or of the writers' is slightly played down? Or does it just fall in the middle?

I grew up in the eighties, I was eleven when the Chernobyl reactor rendered the entire region around it inhabitable for decades to come, the arms race between the US and the USSR was in full swing, and I was fairly convinced that the world would not live to see the year 2000 (apart from a couple of cockroaches). Radiactivity of every description was the stuff of 90% of my nightmares.

I know that Europe has been pickier about nuclear anythings than the US have been (I had a Bugs Bunny comic when I was a child, in which Bugs had a glow-in-the-dark radiactive alarm clock, and I was terrified), but on Heroes, radioactivity's main feat seems to be heat, and after the first half of the first season, it always comes off as pretty "clean". Before that, it was established how destructive Ted's powers were - accidentally killing his wife, making the grass die when he visits her grave, and Audrey Hanson makes it very clear to Matt that radiation could become a problem during Ted's interrogation.

And then it sort of becomes insignificant. I was under the impression that a considerate amount of radiation was necessary before anything started to burn, and that this amount of radiation was able to kill very effectively if unspectacularly (like it did Ted's wife). Matt and the Bennets (minus Claire) should have felt the effects when Ted set their house on fire. I wouldn't be surprised if the cancer rate in Odessa, TX would go up. Noah and Matt got another helping of it in Kirby Plaza, Matt yet another in the Company vault. Makes you kind of happy he left his pregnant wife.

Considering the severity of Nathan's burns and his proximity to Peter when the latter exploded, he would probably have died of radioactive contamination weeks or even months before Adam ever reached him.

What do you think?

^This got me wondering about that within the unaired pilot, u got this islamic dude who happens to be radioactive, u can see his hands actually are in a state of deterioration, my point is, they had a character with those inflictions u are discribing so yea, thought it was disappointing that this didnt make it over to Ted, Which might have made more of a ruckus in the contamination area, but still Ted in its own right is a great character but i see what u getting at hope this helps..

I forgot about the pills... and they sort of help my point, I think. Early on in the show, radiation was being taken a lot more seriously than toward the end of the first series.

I see your point about Peter being in control of his powers in the vault, but I can't imagine him controlling the reach of the radiation. Of course, it'd be just enough to destroy the virus (good that he apparently learned to control that - somehow...) but radiation works a lot like light. You send out the rays, and they'll just emanate and won't stop for a long while. More so than light, which will be blocked by objects in its path. I think Peter can control the intensity and the length of the event, in the vault, but I can't see him altering the physical effects of radiation, making it stop before it reaches Nathan and Matt.