My idea was simple: radiation damage is mostly to proteins, not nuclei (tiny targets). To survive losing the use of proteins, you either need to have different ones than usual whose folded shape is stable with respect to local ionization, or you need to have spares handy. The latter is way easier to arrange, but the price you pay is that you need to actually make more of them, which takes nutrients and energy. If you spend more of your nutrition making more robust cells, you won't make them as quickly, which means the organism is slower-growing.
It occurred to me that this is a cell-centric model, which looks good for single celled organisms (e.g. molds, if you're curious what I've been reading up on recently).
One could have an organism-centric model of radiation resiliance, in which the organism "assumes" that cells are relatively disposable, and generates (and ages-out) cells more rapidly than a normal organism has to.
This too demands more nutrition and energy, but growth rates should be comparable to normal strains of the organism. The organism should need more food than normal to maintain weight -- though I suspect there'd be a lot of variance and you might need larger sample sizes for the study.
The organisms might die younger, too.
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