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I am living in southern Germany, about 1000km west of Chernobyl. It is not safe to eat mushrooms from the local forests and every wild animal shot has to be sca
by _ph_ 10y ago
I am living in southern Germany, about 1000km west of Chernobyl. It is not safe to eat mushrooms from the local forests and every wild animal shot has to be scanned for radioactivity before being allowed to be eaten (and often enough they have to be destroyed). This is not going to change in my lifetime and beyond.
As a physicist, I am certainly not afraid of "nuclear" and "radiation" in the abstract. But seeing the country you live in to be contaminated for so long just because a single operator error is quite sobering. Solar has its challenges on the technical level, as the power output depends on the daytime and weather, but that is not killing anyone. "And who say that batteries can't explode?" - well even if they would, you would have a ruined battery, perhaps a building. That can be rebuild. The damage done by Chernobyl cannot be fixed for centuries.
The good news in all of this is: by now solar has become cheaper than building new, safe and modern nuclear reactors. And as a lot of the grid load in California comes from air conditioning, I fail to see how solar would not be the perfect solution for these kind of loads.
- piotrjurkiewicz 10y ago> It is not safe to eat mushrooms from the local forests and every wild animal shot has to be scanned for radioactivity before being allowed to be eaten (and often enough they have to be destroyed). What a bullshit. Please provide an official source for this claims. Mushrooms in the Central Europe were contaminated, but only for a first few months after the disaster.
- codewritinfool 10y agoNot authoritative, maybe, but there's this: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/radioactive-boars-are-roaming-around-germany-180952586/?no-ist http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/radioactive-boars-a... and this: http://qz.com/258731/radioactive-wild-boars-still-run-wild-in-germany-28-years-after-chernobyl/ http://qz.com/258731/radioactive-wild-boars-still-run-wild-i... Both say the contamination comes from mushrooms.
- _ph_ 10y agoHere is the link to the federal office for radiation protection: https://www.bfs.de/DE/themen/ion/umwelt/lebensmittel/pilze-wildbret/pilze-wildbret.html https://www.bfs.de/DE/themen/ion/umwelt/lebensmittel/pilze-w... It is Ceseium-137 which still contaminates mushrooms and all animals regularly eating those. Occasional consumption is possible but not recommended. And that is 30 years after Chernobyl.
- pasbesoin 10y agoI was in Munich months after the disaster. A great deal of uncertainty, in the public. I remember one particularly scary item: Wild mushrooms from Eastern Europe, e.g. Poland. Only, you didn't have to go that far to have real risk. At that time, some measurements had mushrooms concentrating relevant radioactive isotopes by circa 400 times, IIRC. Weather patterns and geography created particular hot spots in the more immediate area. For some reason, the Tirol sticks in my mind, for one.