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American Honey Is Radioactive from Decades of Nuclear Bomb Testing
- b0tzzzzzzman 6y agoOdd, no mention of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster.
- potiuper 6y agoNo bomb cloud that dispersed heavy elements.
- b0tzzzzzzman 6y agoIf you watch videos of the incident you can see the core exploded. It sent material up over the Pacific ocean. They are also planning to dump millions of gallons of water into the ocean. This in addition to all the current leaks. The main concern is salt water was used to cool the meltdown. This creates very large amounts of isotopes. Ill take the down votes, guess it was the US.
- lucasnortj 6y agogo vegan, problem solved
- JohnBooty 6y agoI remember a few years ago, there was a lot of concern that much of the honey sold in American supermarkets was of unknown origin, and possibly from Asia where safety regulations are more lax. https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2011/11/25/142659547/relax-folks-it-really-is-honey-after-all https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2011/11/25/142659547/re... Well, I guess there's now there's an easy way to tell if your honey is really from America or not: grab a Geiger counter.
- mrlonglong 6y agoUranium glows under UV light so I guess you could try that.
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- excalibur 6y ago> These explosions were tests, shows of force to rival nations, and proof that countries such as Russia, France, and the U.S. had mastered the science of the bomb. Except for the two that weren't.
- jaywalk 6y agoThose two were on the other side of the world, and they're talking about US honey.
- dwighttk 6y ago> Here we show that vegetation thousands of kilometers from testing sites continues to cycle 137Cs because it mimics potassium, and consequently, bees magnify this radionuclide in honey. There were no atmospheric weapons tests in the eastern United States, but most honey here has detectable 137Cs at >0.03 Bq kg−1, and in the southeastern U.S., activities can be >500 times higher.
- dwighttk 6y agoSort of depends on how you define “show of force”
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 6y agoThat's precisely what they were. TL;DR, it was becoming apparent that Japan was not going to surrender, and were willing to fight to the last man standing. The nuclear bomb drops were to demonstrate to the Japanese government that they were clearly outmatched by the end of the war. It worked.
- potiuper 6y agoThere was no need to burn two cities. The head honchos could have been taken to the test(s); with the possibility of surrendering earlier with less territory lost to Soviets.
- ggreer 6y agoHere's the actual paper described by the Vice article.[1] For those who aren't familiar with the unit, a becquerel[2] is one nucleus decay per second. The highest level of Cesium radioactivity they measured was 19 becquerel per kilogram of honey. For comparison, natural potassium has around 31,000 Bq/kg. To put it in more concrete terms: eating a kilogram of the most radioactive honey they found would be equivalent to eating two bananas.[3] 1. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-22081-8 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-22081-8 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Becquerel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Becquerel 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_equivalent_dose https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_equivalent_dose
- seba_dos1 6y agoAs the article notes, a much more important thing to consider is how it influences insects working with pollen and producing that honey rather than how it influences humans who consume it.
- cameron_b 6y agoAs an east coast beekeeper, that was certainly the part that interested me. I've looked into other heavy metal accumulation in honey, namely lead from firing range remediation. In several studies the bees didn't seem to be bothered by collecting lead-rich honey from contaminated plants, though I don't remember the duration over which they were monitored. One of the interesting things with lead is that there are plants more given to storing it in leaves and stalks than flower/nectar/pollen and you can effectively devise a bio-remediation strategy around a few plants, Sunflowers or mustard for instance, that pull up the lead, but don't pass much if any to the honey. The bees stimulate the growth and seed set of the plants, encouraging self-seeding. Nerd-level me would chop and dry the stalks and leaves and test for lead until it fell below the baseline in a few years. You get to fix the soil, while making a valuable product ( once you test the honey for lead as well ) I wonder if similar could be done to pull up the Cesium with Potassium-hungry plants that don't move the Cesium to their flowers. But then how would you dispose of the silage?
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- anitil 6y agoI have a memory that experts advised that it would be safest to perform nuclear bomb tests on the east cost because the trade winds tend to move west to east, and that would ensure that radioactive dust would not fall over habitable land, and result in this very thing. The story being that the west coast was instead chosen because something, something congress. However I'm struggling to find a source. Is this story familiar to anyone else?
- pmiller2 6y agoIt doesn't have the detail about the trade winds, but there is this article about how the Outer Banks was nearly chosen as a test site, based partly on the input of a meteorologist: https://www.pilotonline.com/life/article_6662e143-8b1c-51b8-b3ef-2729d9bd713f.html https://www.pilotonline.com/life/article_6662e143-8b1c-51b8-...
- anitil 6y agoI think I was confusing trade winds with the gulf stream perhaps : "the waste products of nuclear explosions will move eastward out over the Atlantic Ocean" In other news, that article was kind of crazy! They onshored nuclear detonations because of, essentially, PR reasons?