Ironically, the analogy that Iowa State's Dennis Olson uses is also to operating rooms. You're never going to have processing plants like operating rooms. There's bacteria everywhere. While AMI roots for irradiation, some meat processors have doubts that go beyond issues of consumer acceptance. Some of these are known carcinogens.
Irradiation significantly depletes some key nutrients and vitamins.
Wide-scale use of irradiation to process food would be an environmental and worker safety disaster. That radiolytic products exist isn't in dispute, only whether they are significant. A hotly disputed study conducted in India in the 1970s found significant numbers of intrauterine deaths and depression in immune response in rats and mice fed freshly irradiated wheat. There was also an increase in polyploid cells, a chromosomal abnormality, in the bone marrow of rats and mice and the blood of children and monkeys fed freshly irradiated wheat. Similar results were not obtained from non-irradiated wheat or irradiated wheat that had been stored for three months prior to feeding.