Is radium only present in tobacco fertilizers? What separates tobacco fertilizers from other plant fertilizers? Am I at risk for eating tomatoes grown with normal off-the-shelf fertilizer?
It’s also about the system, lungs vs digestion. Digestion has been dealing with natural radiation for longer than we have been smoking.
Good question!
I also want to point out things like strawberries are irradiated on purpose to extend shelf life, not the same thing as radionuclides in the food, but a nice example of radiation protecting the food supply and preventing quick spoilage.
Edit: I think all fertilizers are the same, mostly from petrochemical stock. Nothing separating tobacco and food fertilizer.
I grow my own tea, and use fertilizer. Am I at risk for the same issues after processing the leaves? Additionally, would this then extend to cannabis as well? While they aren't leaves, I'm assuming that radium would end up there as well if in the fertilizer.
I guess what I'm trying to say is what is it specifically about tobacco - is it the mechanism of intake of the tobacco plant specifically, is it a property of all plants and fertilizer, or is it only a property of specific parts of all plants?
Hopefully someone else will either correct me or elaborate.
No, far from it. Extremely little food is irradiated.
"103,000 tonnes of food products were irradiated on mainland United States in 2010"
"6,876 tonnes of food products were irradiated in European Union countries in 2013"
The average American consumes a tonne of food per year, and the average European probably isn't much different. That's 0.03% of food in the USA, and less than 0.001% respectively.
We use them to linearize the energy scale in lower-background germanium detectors. Grocery-store potassium chloride sets our energy calibration.
The bad thing about radium in tobacco, I am told, is that the alpha-emitting radium (or the daughters) tends to aggregate in the lungs. Alphas do a lot of nearby damage, hence a mechanism for lung cancer.
I still eat Brazil nuts without a second thought, even though I've measured the gammas...
I'm guessing this gives a new meaning for the phrase "banana for scale"
You'd need a dedicated campaign to assess the potassium abundance in the "standard" banana before you could use it at better than ~100+% errorbars.
The salt-substitute shaker is probably a <5% standard, and we've been using the same one for years.... :).
Eating vegetables does not lead to tissue irradiation in this manner. You are not at risk from eating tomatoes (or other fruit and veg) whether or not they are fertilized with rock phosphate.