Conventional wisdom is sometimes wrong. Or, if not wrong, perhaps incomplete.
We have learned that ionizing radiation is, in general, not a good thing.
In an extreme example, witness the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 when two nuclear bombs, one uranium and the other plutonium, helped bring about the end of WWII with Japan.
Little Boy and Fat Man, respectively, perhaps saved millions of lives (4M Allied, 10M Japanese) which were estimated to be lost if the U.S. invaded Japan, the last holdout of the Axis powers.
