Brits Concerned about Radioactive Sheep?
May 15th, 2009
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It’s been 22 years since the Chernobyl Unit 2 reactor experienced a catastrophic steam explosion followed by a fire during a “turbine rundown test” that overrode all the plant’s safety systems. Since then, the radioactivity from the incident has decayed to near-ambient levels in all but the closest areas to the reactor. Great Britain is a good 1200-1400 miles from the blast and is generally upwind. Even in 1986, the levels of radioactivity detected in the British Isles was relatively low. Today, it’s minuscule. So one would assume that the British wouldn’t really be concerned about it, right?
Well apparently not.
Britain’s farmers still restricted by Chernobyl nuclear fallout
Environmentalists say controls on 369 farms highlight danger of plans to build nuclear plants around UK.Nearly 370 farms in Britain are still restricted in the way they use land and rear sheep because of radioactive fallout from the Chernobyl nuclear power station accident 23 years ago, the government has admitted.
Environmentalists have seized on the figures as proof of the enormous dangers posed by nuclear power as the UK moves towards building a new generation of plants around the country.
Dawn Primarolo, minister for health, revealed 369 farms and 190,000 sheep were affected, but pointed out this was a tiny number compared with the immediate impact of radioactive fallout from Ukraine.
“This represents a reduction of over 95% since 1986, when approximately 9,700 farms and 4,225,000 sheep were under restriction across the United Kingdom. All restrictions in Northern Ireland were lifted in 2000,” she added.
Wow. The fact that any farms at all are restricted at all due to the Chernobyl event is surprising in and of itself. Even in 1986, it’s unlikely that the British Isles actually received enough fallout to make any restrictions at all necessary. Twenty years later the idea that there still need to be restrictions due to fallout from the Chernobyl event borders on the absurd.
Some background on the levels in question:
The British Isles are a considerable distance from Chernobyl (over one thousand statute miles), and they were not exactly “downwind” from the event either. Europe has a complex pattern of prevailing winds, which is dominated by the southwesterly winds from the Atlantic, but there are also eastern winds, which may vary by season. As a result, although the brunt of any fallout from the Chernobyl area would not be carried toward the British Isles, but some amount could find its way to the area by means of northeasterly winds from Scandinavia.
As one might expect, the radioactivity deposited in Great Britain by the Chernobyl event is extremely small. The brunt of the material remained in the local area with some landing In Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. Western Europe received a fairly small portion of the radioactivity only a few areas of Sweden, Norway and Switzerland receiving even a slight increase in background radiation. For most other areas, the effect is minuscule. In the UK, only a few areas received anything beyond negligible radioactivity.
(Source of map and larger version)
More than twenty years after the accident, the degree of residual radioactivity in Western Europe has decreased even further. Although it was fairly small to begin with, it now represents only a fraction of a percent of the original activity in 1986. The vast majority of gamma emissions from the initial material were produced by relatively short-lived fission byproducts. Those have long since decayed away and today the only significant source of gamma emissions is cesium-137, a “medium lived” fission product that emits high energy beta particles and gamma rays (via the short lived daughter barium-137m) as it decays.
With a half-life of thirty years, the total activity of Cs-137 has dropped signifficantly since Chernobyl, although it has not quite reached the point of one half-life. Of course, in addition to the radioactive decay of the isotope, activity has been reduced further by weathering and sedimentation, which have helped to wash away much of the surface activity in the years since Chernobyl. Today, only a tiny amount of Cs-137 remains and all other major contributors to gamma radiation emissions are long long gone. (Not that they were that high in their concentrations to begin with).
Cesium-137 can be subject to some level of bioacumulation, especially in areas where the soil is not very rich in potassium. Accumulation tends to be limited to plants, however, since the biological half-life of cesium in animals and humans is only about 70 days. Cesium is chemically similar to potassium and therefore plants may uptake the material. If this is a concern (which it rarely is), it can be remedied by the use of some extra potassium fertilizer, which helps to mitigate the uptake of cesium by plants and therefore by the animals that consume them. But a warning to those who are extremely radiophobic: since a significant amount of terrestrial potassium is potassium-40, adding potassium to the mix could actually increase radioactivity.
So just how much radioactivity are we talking about here?
The European Commission imposed a maximum limit of 1,000 becquerels per kilogram (bq/k) of radiocaesium in sheep meat affected by the accident to protect consumers. Under a “mark and release” scheme in the restricted areas, a farmer wishing to move animals out of the area must have them monitored by a hand-held device.
“Any sheep that exceed the working action level are marked with dye and are not released from restrictions,” said a spokesman, who added that mass summer surveys of sheep are performed at farms where there is confidence that restrictions are no longer needed.
Huw Alun Evans’s farm, Hengwrt Uchaf in north Wales, is one of the 369 inside one restricted area. Thousands of his sheep have been scanned for more than two decades. Evans’s animals have failed radiation tests if they have been on higher ground, but the danger levels drop after they have been brought down to graze on lower pastures.
1000 becquerels per kilogram is not a lot. It’s not a lot at all. 1000 becquerels is equal to 0.027 microcuries (millionths of a curie) or 27 nanocuries (billionths of a curie). That’s not much radioactivity at all. In fact, even by food standards, it’s not a whole lot of radioactivity. A single banana may contain a few nanocuries of potassium-40, and even more radioactivity if carbon-14 is considered. One of the most radioactive foods that is likely to be consumed are Brazil nuts, which contain radium-226 and its daughter products. One kilogram of Brazil nuts can have about 14 nanocuries of radium-226 in it. Despite this being a lower total activity than the standard for sheep’s meat, it represents a much higher impact in biological terms. Radium-226 is an extremely powerful alpha emitter and produces a string of daughter products that produce some very intense radiation, thus making 14 nanocuries of radium-226 potentially more potent than 27 nanocures of cesium.
This is, of course, nothing to be concerned over. You could eat Brazil nuts and bananas to your hearts delight and you’d contribute but a drop in the bucket to your annual radiation exposure from a variety of natural sources like cosmic rays, radon gas, carbon-14 and various radioactive minerals. The total radiation dose from a mutton pie is not going to make any noticable difference to anyone’s exposure and is nothing compared to a dental x-ray or a long distance flight in a commercial aircraft.
Are these measurements even accurate?
Given the extremely low amount of radioactivity in question, it’s questionable whether accurate readings on sheep can even be made with simple external methods. To determine the amount of a radio nuclides in a substance with a high degree of accuracy, samples are usually subjected to laboratory tests using methods like liquid scintillation counters. Simply sweeping a sheep with a portable radiation detector will give some idea of the overall radioactivity of the animal, but these numbers are so extremely small, that even the best meters would have difficulty accurately picking these levels out from background radiation.
Most handheld or portable radiation meters can’t distinguish between radio nuclides. Therefore, simply showing that a sheep were a bit more radioactive than the rest would not necessarily mean that it had a high level of Cs-137. It could simply be that the sheep had been around some thorium or uranium rich minerals and had gotten some dust on it. It is possible to measure only emissions related to Cs-137 through the use of portable spectrometers, but again, given the small amounts, it would be at best, difficult to tell which sheep were above normal levels. In all cases, since the measurements are external, the detector is measuring mostly the activity on the surface of the animal. Therefore, a sheep that had just been sheered and had been dunked in water is likely to register far lower than a sheep that had several months worth of wool, covered with dust and dirt on it.
Of course, this begs another question: Is it any worse to have a sheep with a high level of activity due to Cs-137 than a sheep with high activity due to the variance in natural source material? If you’re one of those who believes that “natural” means “harmless and good” then perhaps. Otherwise, it just goes to show how silly this all is.
All in all, the very idea that these animals would have a high enough in radioactivity to justify monitoring by handheld devices, or even that these measurements mean anything is patently absurd.
This entry was posted on Friday, May 15th, 2009 at 7:25 pm and is filed under Bad Science, Culture, Enviornment, Nuclear, Obfuscation, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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May 15th, 2009 at 7:44 pm
Even sunlight, (also in fact a form of radiation,) can kill with too much exposure, conversely not enough will harm a human as well. A number of scientist believe, that what is true of sunlight, may be true of other forms of radiation. They claim that low-dose radiation has been shown to enhance biological responses for immune systems, enzymatic repair, physiological functions and help prevent the onset of cancer. This effect known as radiation hormesis: a moderate overcompensation to a disruption in homeostasis caused by the radiation; it is a stimulus to the repair mechanisms that cope with non-radiation damage as well, so that the overall effect is a health benefit. Many studies have been done that support this view.
No chromosomal damage was detectable in animals with high radiation counts living around Chernobyl and a lower than expected increases in cancers have been found in the human population living near the area at the time of the accident. This is not an isolated case, populations living in areas of high natural radiation show a marked decrease in the cancers reported, and occupational studies on nuclear industry workers, where they had good radiation dosimetry and records, found that cancer mortality was statistically significantly lower among nuclear workers than among non-nuclear workers.
At a minimum the unwarranted fear of radiation has created astronomical expenses in the public and private sector attempting to protect the population from dangers that are not really there. It has severely limited the use of therapeutic radiation treatments and hobbled the development of new ones. It has severely limited the use of radiation to reduce spoilage in food, and to disinfest food shipments of vermin. Most importantly an unwarranted fear of radiation hazards has limited the development of nuclear energy by unnecessarily raising the cost of nuclear power plants and generating public opposition to their construction.
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May 15th, 2009 at 9:04 pm
*Borders* on the absurd? It’s freaking surreal.
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May 15th, 2009 at 11:45 pm
As pointed out, this precaution was probably unnecessary all the way back in 1986, at least in England and Scotland. If it were in Russia, maybe, but it was probably never needed that far away. Today, it’s just crazy over the top.
It’s the kind of thing that you have to ask if the public fear and confusion this causes outweighs the advantages. It’s not only unnecessary but it’s just not worth the problems. Scanning sheep with a survey meter because of Chernobyl, which was a thousand miles away and twenty years ago is the height of panic based policy to the point of it almost being funny if it weren’t real.
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May 16th, 2009 at 12:10 am
Just a thought, but I’d like to know if there is any kind of compensation that goes along with this.
It is possible the flock owners in the so-called restricted areas are the ones pushing for this to continue because these kind of restrictions are very often accompanied by some kind of payout to those who are involved. If the government restricts you from selling your sheep or the wool or something then they likely have some kind of payout which is to offset this or at least that is the theory.
If that is the case, it may be that those who own sheep would fight to have their sheep restricted and therefore a write-off for their value, which may be higher than the real market value. It is a similar idea to insurance fraud.
I don’t know this is the case, but I’d be interested to know if they get some payouts back due to this situation.
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May 16th, 2009 at 12:11 am
From the very beginning, radiation has been shrouded in myths leading to exaggerated expectations that has caused excessive fear. The fear stems from the common belief that any dose of radiation increases the likelihood of the dreaded conditions of cancer and congenital malformations. The LNT hypothesis—the linear extrapolation of the incidences of these diseases from the high dose range to the low dose range—is contradicted by a very large amount of evidence that has been accumulated since the discovery of ionizing radiation, more than a century ago.
Psychological trauma, avoidable disruptions and wasted expenditures, could have been minimized if systemic rules of scientific evidence about radiation effects had been practiced in the last sixty years. Adding credibility to the hype has been selective use of epidemiological studies on radiation effects, as well as an idiotic emphasis on ‘consensus,’ a method appropriate in politics that has no place in the hard sciences. As a result, unfounded fear of radiation, adversely impacting public understanding of nuclear phenomena, has reinforced radiophobia. Decision-makers have overreacted without understanding the underlying science and without applying the scientific method.
Which is not to say that intense ionizing radiation is anything to bugger around with, or that it is not potentially dangerous, just that its dangers have been exaggerated by several orders of magnitude.
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May 16th, 2009 at 1:26 am
RBR1978 said:
That would not surprise me. Idiotic policies by the government such as ridiculously overreaching restrictions are often due to the fact that some small group is benefiting and getting a big fat payout over it.
DV82XL said:
Agreed, it’s irrational and a kind of phobia that can take the dangers out of context. Of course ionizing radiation is dangerous and potentially deadly in high enough doses and nobody is going to argue with that, but it should be approached proportional to the actual circumstances. Like with Chernobyl, there were some who got a huge dose of radiation and died from it or may have life long concequences because they were right next to the epicenter, but that is not here nor there for the British who are so far away and especially now in 2009.
You could say the same thing about nonionizing radiation. People have an irrational fear and it is not related to the actual dangers. It can be very dangerous in high enough levels and it can create some horrible and downright frightening injuries. High power microwave transmitters can turn human tissue into goo before you even feel the heat and they can rupture all the blood vessels and cells in an area. One of the worst injuries is to the eyes, because they can’t dissipate the heat fast enough and the fluid inside the eye can get hot. It can scald your retina and leave you blind for life.
There is no way in hell a wifi access point or a cell phone would do this to you and a cell phone tower is perfectly safe at the base too. It’s a danger that is not understood enough by people to dispel their fears.
Soylent said:
Welcome to the politics and policies of panic. It would be so much funnier if it weren’t real and costing so much to deal with these things.
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May 16th, 2009 at 3:58 am
Good map, better than others I’ve seen (the linked version has good detail).
From the map of the fallout pattern, it looks like the British got the lowest registered levels for most of the area and just slightly higher for a few patches. If they are so concerned about these levels being dangerous then the Swiss and Checs and Swedes must be dropping dead like flies because those areas got many times more. Of course they’re not, which is just one reason why this is so stupid.
I am sure any nuclear related group which opposed these restrictions would be painted like the devil and who else is going to make the effort to call on this politically? There are for sure political factions that support this and will love to use it for whatever PR they may want. Too bad
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May 16th, 2009 at 11:34 am
Give them some more credit. This is a circumstance that a precautionary approach is the best way to go. I would not feel comfortable with ANY radioactive fallout in my food or my family’s and I don’t care if they say there is a limit because as far as I am concerned there is no safe limit and anything else is gambling with lives. There is no known safe amount and they keep pushing the numbers of what is okay down further. Little harm is one thing but I want no harm. Chernobyl hit these areas too even if not as bad as the lands around Ukraine.
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May 16th, 2009 at 12:38 pm
But Linda, you do have naturual fallout in you food from volcanic eruptions. It’s not much but it’s there. So how are you going to protect your children from that.
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May 16th, 2009 at 1:07 pm
Linda1966UK said:
First of all there are known safe amounts of radiation, second there is naturally occurring radioactive substances in what we eat, and has been forever.
Legislatively, not scientifically the current standard is the linear no-threshold model (LNT), which states that the damage caused by ionizing radiation presupposes that the response is linear (i.e. directly proportional to the dose) at all dose levels. Thus LNT asserts that there is no threshold of exposure below which there is no adverse impact. In practice this means that if a particular dose of radiation is found to produce one extra case of cancer in every thousand people exposed, the LNT predicts that one thousandth of this dose will produce one extra case in every million people so exposed, and that one millionth of this dose will produce one extra case in every billion people exposed, and so on with no safe limit except zero. Thus it is claimed that radiation’s carcinogenic effects should be considered to be proportional to the dose an individual receives, regardless of how small that dose is. However the evidence against the linear model has been solid as a rock for 40 years. Yet the LNT model prevails because regulators are being leaned politically not to relax standards in this area.
The LNT model was first considered in the 1940s purely on the theoretical grounds that a single hit by ionizing radiation on a single cell could cause chromosome damage that could cause a mutation or cancer without any hard evidence to support that contention. The justification for using the LNT model at the time was that too many test animals or too much time would be needed to evaluate chronic dose rates. It was assumed that as more data was made available it would be modified accordingly. But if the LNT model is correct, there is no “no observed adverse effect level” (NOAEL) for regulators to observe, thus officials responsible for public health can claim justification in calling for minimization of exposures to ionizing radiation. Note that this is tantamount to saying that avoiding sunlight is justified on the grounds that nobody will get sunburns in the dark. Added to this, during the Cold War a number of people promoted the LNT model in an attempt to discourage nearly all uses of nuclear weapons and nuclear power, and used it as leverage in their campaigns. As a result the radiophobes and politicians took a handy but false rule of thumb that was always meant to be a transitional position and enshrined it in law and regulation. The second problem, related, is that this results in a lot of stupid but expensive procedures where people and vendors can make a lot of money thus entrenching this false standard through special interests.
NORM is an acronym for Naturally Occurring Radioactive Material, which includes all radioactive elements found in the environment. Long-lived radioactive elements such as uranium, thorium and potassium and any of their decay products, such as radium and radon. These elements have always been present in the earth’s crust and within tissues of all living beings. NORM is the source of background terrestrial radiation which varies from place to place depending on where you live. Because it is everywhere, NORM is encountered in many places: bathroom tile, cat litter, salt replacements toothpaste, dentures, (yes dentures) fertilizer, Brazil nuts, antidiarrhea medication and the coatings on glossy magazines. That isn’t even an exhaustive list, I could have tripled its length without trying. The point is, low dose radiation is everywhere. We are constantly bathed in it, from the very ground we walk on, and at levels far exceeding the exposure one would revive from eating mutton from one of these sheep.
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May 16th, 2009 at 5:42 pm
BTW I think I’ll point out the book _Wormwood Forest: A Natural History of Chernobyl_ by Mary Mycio, in which she documents how the area around Chernobyl has become the greatest wildlife refuge in Europe.
If there is any negative effect on the wildlife due to increased radioactivity, it is greatly exceeded by the benefits of to the wildlife of not having a lot of human interference.
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May 16th, 2009 at 8:03 pm
Jim Baerg said:
There has not been an area impacted by radiation more studied that the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone and populations. There has been one study after another, with the clear intention of finding horrors that could be held up as an indictment of nuclear energy, and next to nothing has been found.
Even the increase in thyroid cancer, which has been the worst impact, seems to have been due to the fact that that population was at risk because of chronically low levels of iodine in their systems at the time of the accident. In other words, had they not suffered from low iodine levels in the first place, they would not have absorbed such a high dose of the radioactive form from the burning reactor. In the general population of the contaminated regions, there is so far no convincing evidence that Chernobyl has increased the number of cases of leukemia or solid cancers, except for childhood thyroid cancer and after twenty years only 15 patients died have from it. There is no convincing evidence of effects on human fertility and heritable diseases, nor have any effects been observed for pregnancy outcomes and on the overall health of children of exposed parents.
Studies investigating the long-term ecological and evolutionary repercussions of chronic exposure to residual radioactive contaminants in the area have had to reach down to very sketchy statistically effects to show an impact.
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May 17th, 2009 at 2:38 am
It seems implausible that the reported restrictions are the result of contamination from the Chernobyl reactor fire. If you look at the Guardian article, note that 9 farms that are subjected to restrictions are only ~40 kilometres East of a place called Sellafield. The southernmost extent of the Welsh farms is Dolgellau ~190 km very nearly due South from Sellafield. Figures from Google Earth.
Why this mention of Sellafield?
Well, in 1957 there was another reactor core fire, it occurred at Windscale in Cumbria, later rebranded ‘Sellafield’. Now this reactor fire wasn’t related to electricity generation, it was related to the other kind of nuclear power. Manufacturing plutonium for the UK’s soon to be H-bomb and was subject to the highest levels of secrecy. The fire lasted three days.
There was some official disinformation about the weather. The official story was that the radiation cloud was blown out over the Irish Sea, but this was somewhat undermined by the fact that part of the cloud deposited radioactive fallout that was detected in mainland Europe.
Then there is this snippet from the Low Level Radiation Campaign:
‘LLRC went to the Meteorological Office Archives in Bracknell.., the original reports of wind speed and direction had been tampered with.
Record sheets for 1957 had been removed from the Met. Office’s Windscale station volume and replaced with new sheets of a slightly different colour from the sheets for previous and subsequent years. The pages for 1957 read: NO RECORD — MAST DISMANTLED The mast “reappeared” in November. When we pointed this out to the archivist he had a good laugh.’
http://www.llrc.org/rat/subrat/windscale.htm
According to New Scientist 700 terabequerels were released, the original source was not cited.
The most telling thing about the Guardian article is that there is no mention of the UK’s worst nuclear accident, the world’s worst nuclear release until the Three Mile Island accident in 1979.
Now I realise this isn’t science, but I suspect in the UK, that the genuine truth will never publicly be known, due to official secrecy.
Sorry for the anonymity, but I really don’t want to be scrutinised by SIS.
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May 17th, 2009 at 3:03 am
A further observation:
Looking at the Guardian map pdf from the Guardian article, it’s perfectly obvious that the areas of the original restricted area: North Wales and Isle of Anglesey; Cumbria; the Southern Uplands of Scotland form a horseshoe around Sellafield / Windscale.
In the absence of further information, it looks much more convincing than the incredible Chernobyl story. It perhaps might explain why the contamination is taking much longer than anticipated to decay if it it really had been Chernobyl. The short-lived species have all decayed, leaving the longer lived isotopes.
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May 17th, 2009 at 3:40 am
sellafield said:
An interesting observation however that complex has experienced critical loss of containment incidences going back to the fire in 1957. Freaking out about what is obviously low levels of radioisotopes now seems like slamming the barn door after the horses have fled.
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May 17th, 2009 at 3:51 am
It is possible that they could be realated to Sellafield / Windscale.
Any Cs-137 in the enviornment, with the exception of extremely tiny amounts due to cosmic rays or spontanious fission, is the result of one of the following:
- Chernobyl
- Atmospheric nuclear tests by the US/Soviet Union/British/Chinese/French
- Other smaller containment losses (Windscale, a few minor ones at Hanford in the early years, several Soviet incidents)
- The release of a Cs-137 source, possibly intentionally for the purpose of evaluating its spread.
So it could be that the source is something other than Chernobyl.
But in any of these cases, we need to keep in mind that the equipment we have these days can measure something like Cs-137 down to the most ridiculously minute levels.
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May 18th, 2009 at 2:54 pm
It’s “radio nuclides,” not “radio nucleotides.”
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May 18th, 2009 at 11:37 pm
This article is very accurate and it is demonstrated here radiationhormesis.com
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May 18th, 2009 at 11:57 pm
VADIM said:
During the 1960’s and 1970’s, about 40 articles per year described hormesis. In 1963, the AEC repeatedly confirmed lower mortality in guinea pigs, rats and mice irradiated at low dose. In 1964, the cows exposed to about 150 rads after the Trinity A-Bomb test in 1946 were quietly euthanized because of extreme old age. This trend continues. It was found that there was decreased cancer mortality in government nuclear facility workers in Canada, the UK, and the US. Whether exposed in uranium mines or processing plants, laboratories, or nuclear power plants—and whether the exposure was to uranium, plutonium, thorium or radium, so long as the dose was 50 times background (chronic) or, 50 rad acute, workers were healthier than those in the general population, mainly due to lower cancer incidence. Decreased cancer mortality, decreased leukemia rate, decreased infant mortality rate and increased lifespan in atomic bomb survivors from both Hiroshima and Nagasaki who received 1.2 rad. was found and a 20% lower cancer death rate in Idaho, Colorado and New Mexico, which have background radiation of 0.72 rad/yr compared with Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama with 0.22 rad/yr was also reported. There were many other similar examples as a quick look through the literature will reveal.
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May 19th, 2009 at 4:32 am
VADIM said:
While I agree that the theory behind radioation hormesis is sound, I am not so sure about that website. I’m not so sure I’d be encouraging people to expose themselves to radiation from sources like minerals, especially without metering. This is not just a radiation concern, but has to do with heavy metal toxicity.
The other thing: I really doubt that hormesis is going to lead to any noticable acute effects, and I am unaware of any studies that have shown this to be the case either. Exposure to a certain level of radiation may improve general health down the road, but will it relief any condition you have in the short term? I tend to doubt that.
Also I do not believe that radiation hormesis would be best applied through the ingestion of radioactive substances. That would cause much higher doses to some tissues than others, based on the absorption rate and it might turn out to be a bit unpredictable.
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May 19th, 2009 at 10:07 am
drbuzz0 said:
The truth is every stone is measured individually and is effective based on the last 25 years of experiments with the stones, as far as getting it inside your body there is also a water stone that you can put in your water to “energize” it and then drink it, there are plenty of studies shown here – http://radiationhormesis.com/?page_id=25
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May 19th, 2009 at 5:41 pm
VADIM said:
While some of the referenced articles seem to be legitimate studies on hormesis, the idea that “healing stones’ are of any value is not supported by any of this research. I am afraid that these are just a quack product with no proven benefit.
For example you cannot “energize” water by soaking these stones in it, this is nonsense.
It is hard enough to convince the general public that radiation hormesis is a real phenomenon, it is not helped by the appearance of charlatans and mountebanks pushing ineffectual products.
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September 18th, 2009 at 4:10 pm
I live in one of the affected areas in Norway. we were hit a lot harder than britain and even today there is a measurable increase in the background radiation in this area. it’s not high enough to be of any real concern tho. however it does accumulate in mushrooms and subsequently into sheep.
Cesium is chemically measured in the sheep’s milk when evaluating whither to say it’s safe or not. 14 days with downfeeding is more than enough to remove 95%+ of all the cesium the sheep has taken on during it’s summer feeding in the mountains and forests. years with lots of mushrooms paradoxically tend to concentrate the cesium in the sheep and even tho the overall activity in these areas is just slightly elevated the accumulation resulting from this will cause the amounts to exceed the allowed limits for human consumption.. ironically. people come from far away to come pick those mushrooms. Prime quality kantarells are a big part of the local diet, and you know… nobody checks those before tucking in.
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September 18th, 2009 at 6:27 pm
That is very interesting. I have to admit I’m not very familiar with the practice of going somewhere to pick mushrooms. In the United States (where I live) there are a lot of wild mushrooms. There are a few species that are eatable. They compose a relatively small portion of the wild mushroom population. The rest are toxic, many are deadly even in one small dose. They are notoriously difficult to tell apart, as some species look very much alike and some are found growing together, so even if a species is eatable, there may be stems or fragments from other species mixed in.
Therefore, where I am from, nobody would dare eat a wild mushroom unless they were a botanist and even they might be weary of it.
I would not worry too much about a few kantarells containing enough Cs-137 to cause much harm. Just like sheep, it clears the bodies of humans fairly rapidly as well. If you want to reduce the amount of Cs-137 in mushrooms or plants, there is an easy way to do it. Cesium is chemically similar to potassium and this is one reason why it is absorbed by organisms. If there are any well known places for the gathering of mushrooms, simply treat these areas with a good dose of potassium fertilizer. This will reduce the uptake of the Cs-137.
Of course, if the mushrooms are scattered around the hills in random places, that might not be possible. I don’t know, but if they occur regularly in patches, it might be a good solution.
The levels may be higher than normal, but I doubt they’d be high enough to get overly concerned. So I would not get too worked up about it. Also, like sheep, it does clear the human body fairly quickly
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September 19th, 2009 at 1:45 am
They grow in regular patches. but fertilizing those is not something that people will allow. firstly the good ones only grow in areas that are untouched. their choice of biotope is very picky. and any interference causes the mushrooms to die off. it’s one of those mushrooms nobody have been able to cultivate because nobody despite a lot of effort and money has been able to figure out what this particular species needs to survive.
these factors means that farmers that own these forests are very protective and will not harvest trees around the best areas. but actually preserve them by keeping them secret if possible.
there is no chance to confuse these with toxic ones. it’s the number one safe mushroom and it’s a very popular one. it’s even sold in stores in years of plenty. this year has had a record harvest tho and i think some of it has even been exported abroad.
When it comes to gourmet foods nobody is going to bother with any potential radioactivity that is really not that significant. despite bellona’s best efforts at obfuscating and lying. you wont find any doctors advising against eating these mushrooms.
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