

Adding context: Alpha particles can kill you, and are actually more lethal than gamma because alpha has so much more mass than gamma.
Because of its size though, an alpha particule cannot penetrate your skin. However alpha is incredibly dangerous if you ingest it, giving it direct access to your soft internal organ tissue. When working jobs that had a risk of alpha contamination, we had to run constant air samples and take extra precautions to protect eyes/nose/mouth from an accidental “uptake.”
The good news is that alpha is only present really when you’re working on the core, or primary loop. This rarely happens outside of refueling outages. Gamma will be the concern the rest of the time.
Beta matters too, but as one might expect, beta is a little beta bitch.
Agreed