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Comment by worldvoyageur | Hacker News Reader

When Chernobyl happened I was a physics undergrad in Kingston, Ontario, Canada and was spending the summer term on campus. We (the grad students really) went up to the roof of the physics building and started measuring for the radiation. There was much rejoicing when it turned up, which as I imperfectly remember was about two weeks after the incident.

Which is to say, that the radiation could be measured is different from saying that the radiation represented a significant health risk.

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Not all of us have the luxury of having more than 7000 km between us and the next nuclear accident, though. But I can send you some mushrooms from the forests of southern Germany if you would like to explore the health risks further.

>"But I can send you some mushrooms from the forests of southern Germany if you would like to explore the health risks further."

Sounds like the GP would receive mushrooms that have elevated levels of radionuclides that are within the legal limit of what is considered safe to consume.

"Around 95% of wild mushroom samples collected in Germany in the last six years still showed radioactive contamination from the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster, albeit not above legal limits, the German food safety regulator said on Friday."

[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/three-decades-g...

It's tree moss that is the larger risk apparently. It 'breathes' particles and keeps them. Wild boar love it; you shoot a wild boar, you have to get it tested with a Geiger counter to make sure it's safe. Like mercury in salmon, boar are a concentrator for fallout!

Seems like it would be completely fine to eat, even regularly. With mushrooms having 1000 Bq/kg at worst, according to samples by BfS.

> The consumption of 200 grams of mushrooms with 2,000 becquerel caesium-137 per kilogram results in an exposure of 0.005 millisievert. This is considerably less than the radiation exposure during a flight from Frankfurt to Gran Canaria. However, if adults eat such a mushroom meal each week, they will receive an additional annual radiation exposure corresponding to about twenty flights from Frankfurt to Gran Canaria. Expressed in numbers it is 0.27 millisievert.

https://www.bfs.de/EN/topics/ion/environment/foodstuffs/mush...

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