Mushrooms in Germany are still contaminated today from the Chernobyl fallout: https://www.bfs.de/EN/topics/ion/environment/foodstuffs/mush...
Below 100mSv, there is "no evidence" that exposure leads to any elevation of cancer risk. At levels covered by the article, ie 1000Bq/kg / 80000 Bq/mSv = 0.0125 mSv/kg.
In other words, you can eat 8 tons of those mush before there is any measurable increase in cancer risk.
And breating the air in Berlin for 1 year is MUCH more dangerous than eating those 8000 kg of mushrooms. (Not to speak about taking a single shot of covid vaccine.)
In other words, dispite being scientifically "true", the net effect of an article like this, is to mislead people into thinking that radiation is a lot more dangerous than it is in reality.
If nuclear were to be treated like other health hazards in our environment, the thresholds should be set somewhere between 10000-100000Bq/kg, depending on how much people would eat of that food in a year, not at 600Bq/kg.
For the mushrooms, as a side order, even every day would be harmless. If you follow some stone age diet, eating only meat, then MAYBE eating those boars every day might cause a measurable increase in cancer risk. Probably still less than simply breathing the air in a city, though.
> and the contamination was much higher in the first months/years after Chernobyl
In the first days and months after Chernobyl, there were real reasons to be somewhat careful. That was before the short-lived isotopes had decayed. Once the decays of those isotopes took over, and Cs-137 became the main source, the levels were pretty safe, even if they were double compared to today (the half-life of Cs137 is 30 years).
> The overall point is that the impact was not restricted to a 50 mile radius as suggested by the GP.
And this is where my main objection is. The "impact" as counted in measurable increase in cancer risk, is nil.
By employing the ultra-conservative "linear no-threshold model" (LNT) of radiatino risk, then theoretically, over a very large population, you could calculate some number of expected cancer cases. But there is (last time I checked) no consensus that the LNT hypothesis matches data better than a null-hypothesis that doses under about 100mSv are harmless.
In any case, at that level, the risk for any given individual is so small, that it disappears next to any other risk you can imagine from pollutants or similar, so there is no reason to take such hypothetical risks into account for your personal behavior.
Just because it is well known that vaccines come with a tiny, tiny risk of some complication doesn't mean we should not take them. They save a lot more lives than they take.
is the same as
Just because it is well know that nuclear power come with a tiny, tiny risk of some complication doesn't mean we should not use it. It saves a lot more lives than it takes.
From: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...
We seem to have been fine burning coal and not thinking about the radiation that puts into the surrounding environment.
It's also disingenuous to think that there aren't negative environmental externalities from the production and operation of "renewables".
All forms of energy production will have some negative consequences and we need to understand what those are and think of ways to mitigate them, rather than just pointing to what's bad about one form and ignore what's bad about others.
It's like a kid preferring 5 nickels to 2 quarters because 5 is more.
In many places that role is being moved to NG. The immediate hiccup is a short-term setback that will be fixed the way we are doing, building out renewables, later storage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sievert
Even if it's not perfectly accurate, it's probably quite close.