Cesium-soaked truffles may keep fallout in an environment’s food web
science.org
science.org
The original title is:
Disproportionately High Contributions of 60 Year Old Weapons-137Cs Explain the Persistence of Radioactive Contamination in Bavarian Wild Boars
The link is: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acs.est.3c03565
From the abstract:
> Although Chornobyl has been widely believed to be the prime source of 137Cs in wild boars, we find that “old” 137Cs from weapons fallout significantly contributes to the total level (10–68%) in those specimens that exceeded the regulatory limit. In some cases, weapons-137Cs alone can lead to exceedances of the regulatory limit, especially in samples with a relatively low total 137Cs level. Our findings demonstrate that the superposition of older and newer legacies of 137Cs can vastly surpass the impact of any singular yet dominant source and thus highlight the critical role of historical releases of 137Cs in current environmental pollution challenges.
Our samples (2019–2021) range from 370 to 15,000 Bq·kg–1 137Cs, thus exceeding the regulatory limits (600 Bq·kg–1) by a factor of up to 25.
They are: https://www.bfs.de/SharedDocs/Pressemitteilungen/BfS/DE/2023...
We do not need Germanys CO2 emissions. That's the big problem here. And the amount of radioactivity spewed into the atmosphere by German coal plants is way bigger than cold war era weapon testing.
I wouldn’t say it’s a taste of truffle though, it’s just a different, stronger flavour (that I quite like).
A better conclusion would be “stabilize your energy production before shortages and rolling environmental catastrophes lead to a rise in fascism and a third world war”.
"For weapons-137Cs, the cessation of atmospheric tests resulted in no noteworthy new weapons-137Cs fallout after the last test in 1980 ... this study illustrates that strategic decisions to conduct atmospheric nuclear tests 60–80 years ago still impact remote natural environments, wildlife, and a human food source today."
The anti-nuclear position comes from radioactive boars and even more-so from the fuck up that is the Jülich experimental reactor, a "safe by design" system that by now took 40 years of maintenance while taking another 80 before it can be dismantled.
Politics and industry have demonstrated that they can't ensure safe nuclear operation in Germany. USSR (1986) and Japan (2011) just drove the point home that it's not a specific German failing.
(Case in point: the anti-nuclear movement in Germany started in the 1970s. Unless you believe in time travel, those big incidents at most fueled the flames)
The whole green movement in the Germany was co-created by KGB, in order to hamper West Germany's economic development.
Politics and industry have repeatedly demonstrated that nuclear power generation is one of safest industries in the history of humanity. One terawatt-hour of nuclear causes on average one premature death in 33 years, even safer than wind and hydro.
And considering how absolutely ancient the Japanese reactors are, they came incredibly close to not failing. Anything modern simply wouldn't have.
That was the claim for the technology they developed at Jülich, too. And it does look good on paper.
Seriously, as long as you try to argue on technical merit, you're missing the point of the debate on nuclear power in Germany. It all came down to having to trust people who have demonstrated that they're not at all trustworthy.
So we're dealing with an industry that cuts corners whenever it feels like it, and received unlimited backing of politics by sweeping incidents under the nearest rug, and trampling over communities at will (see how the Wentland region was chosen to become a permanent storage site for nuclear waste).
In such an environment at some point any statistics are meaningless, even harmful: they drive home the point that in face of the nuclear industry and its political handling, the people are just a statistic. Why should the people put up with that?
Nuclear power in Germany wasn't a technical failing (for the most part), it was politics colluding with the industry in a way that evaporated any trust.
Nuclear technology is highly regulated for good reason (enriched uranium 235 isn't simply available "over the counter", for example), which increases the amount of trust required. It wasn't any particular incident that killed nuclear power in Germany, it was the inability to act responsibly.
And then, the fact remains that air pollution kills millions of people every year and nuclear plants do not. "Acting responsible" in this circumstances means more nuclear.
It's not like we need a fixed amount of energy X, and have to choose how to get it. Rather, we say we want to discontinue fossil at a certain fixed pace, and say, OK what is the effect of turning off nuclear on the power price? And what is the effect on the economy?
And given that nuclear energy in Germany is not actually that cheap, and hugely unpopular, it was an easy decision.
Short-term they explicitly chose produce more co2 emissions in 2022, not to decrease economic activity. They "procure enough energy just fine" by burning coal.
Long-term Germany's co2 emissions are more than 2-2.5x of France, both annual and cumulative. That is THE result of their anti-nuclear strategy.
Here, we target radiocesium contamination in wild boars from Bavaria. Our samples (2019–2021) range from 370 to 15,000 Bq·kg–1 137Cs, thus exceeding the regulatory limits (600 Bq·kg–1) by a factor of up to 25.
They don't quantify the cancer risk that would result from eating wild boar meat in Germany. I imagine it would be quite difficult to do so, given that the degree of contamination varies so much.
Deepl: “ …Wild boars are therefore more affected by radiation than other forest animals because they feed on fungi that accumulate cesium in particular, which fell mainly over Bavaria in 1986 after the Chernobyl disaster.”
[1] https://www.augsburger-allgemeine.de/bayern/Augsburg-Entsorg...
It’s been a while since I spoke with people who hunt in Germany, but there’s a whole fucking system in place for this.
After you shoot them, you have to take them in to be tested. Most people do.
If the meats safe you can keep it, etc, but a lot of the time in certain regions the meats contaminated (too much radiation) so it’s destroyed.
Emission limits for coal power plants: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/bimschv_13_2021/__5.html (and a few other places in that ordinance)
Some are higher, some are lower. I don't understand the rationale either, but "much stronger controls" isn't universally true.
You can think metabolism as a sort of intricately complex burning ritual.
Cesium would be excreted as solid waste, winding up in water treatment plant sludge.
For combusted carcasses, absent particulates (which could be largely trapped via scubbers), that would likely wind up principally as ash.
(Note that non-combusted boars are already expelling CO2 through respiration, as well as more potent gases such as methane through metabolism and decomposition of solid wastes. Methane production through human livestock is among the concerns of climate forcing, though I suspect wild boar populations are sufficiently small to not have a significant impact.)
This sounds like grasping at straws, a last-ditch effort to scare the not-so-easily-persuadable-anymore into opposing modern power development with nuclear fission.
And here is your yearly reminder that Friends of the Earth was founded with a donation from Robert Orville Anderson, an oil baron: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friends_of_the_Earth_(US)
Also I hear there is an "Asterix" crossover coming, although Captain Boaring only gets a small part.