A lot of s' food is irradiated before they send it up so that they... aren't going to get sick from it. - Suzie Sheehy

People in the U.S. did think about building a particle accelerator (a neutral beam accelerator) that they would launch into space... and then they would use it to shoot down satellites and... missiles and destroy anything that they didn't like, because they were going to have this super powerful beam in space.

[S]ometimes some of our craziest ideas, and I've been through some pretty crazy ideas of things that you could do with a particle accelerator here... [S]ometimes they turn out to be surprisingly good ones if you do them in the right way, and these machines are not just useful for particle physics. They're useful for all sorts of other things like cancer treatment, like killing bacteria in food, and other things I haven't discussed like carbon dating, and imaging down to the atomic scale, and all sorts of other things...

This is not a dangerous process. In fact it's a really really useful process to kill the bacteria in our food and make it healthy for human consumption, and just because we've irradiated it does not mean that it becomes radioactive. So there's a distinct difference here between a naturally radioactive food, or something [like a thoriated rod] which would be genuinely harmful to me if I ate it, and food which has been irradiated, because it's only gone through that process to treat it to make it fit for human consumption.