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Nuclear fallout is showing up in U.S. honey, decades after bomb tests
- Victerius 5y agoI like honey and nuclear weapons. I consume honey on a daily basis. Can this affect my health? Am I eating radioactive fallout?
- vmchale 5y ago> Levels of radioactive cesium aren’t concerning, but See the subtitle.
- tenpies 5y agoIf anything, in tens of thousands of years, when anthropologists dig up the remains of the 2000s civilizations, you will make it that much easier for them to date us.
- masklinn 5y ago
- GordonS 5y agoI can understand liking nuclear power, but you like... nuclear weapons?! Or has my sarcasm meter failed miserably?!
- hetspookjee 5y agoWell minus the fallout and mortalities quite some people, included, find big explosions quite awesome. I wouldn’t say I like nuclear weapons specifically though
- missedthecue 5y agoThere is a theory that the so called 'Long Peace' of 1945-present is a direct consequence of nuclear proliferation. This could be one possible reason to like nuclear weapons. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Peace https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Peace
- ssivark 5y agoSure… but that’s an off-by-one error from wiping out civilization.
- nexuist 5y agoIt is impossible to know how many civilian lives have been saved from conventional weaponry (including your own) because the threat of nuclear holocaust has nullified any benefits from such attacks. For example, I find it extremely hard to believe that the US mainland would have been able to go this long without being bombed without its nuclear arsenal. We've pissed off a lot of people that would love to destroy us but they can't because we would carry out our own holocaust within minutes. Countless American, Russian, Chinese, Israeli, and Indian wars have fizzled out before the first shot because of the implication of nuclear bombardment.
- dtech 5y agoIt's in the article > The radiocesium levels reported in the new study fall "well below" 1200 becquerels per kilogram—the cutoff for any food safety concerns, the agency (red: FDA) says.
- devmunchies 5y ago> I like honey and nuclear weapons I eat enough honey that I AM a nuclear weapon.
- selimthegrim 5y agoOut of the mouths of (ideally older than one year old) babes...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- omgJustTest 5y agoradwatch.berkeley.edu (This is an educational site that does food monitoring as public outreach. It is underfunded, and full disclosure, I am a former leader of the project).
- omgJustTest 5y agohttps://radwatch.berkeley.edu/current-air-activity/ https://radwatch.berkeley.edu/current-air-activity/ https://radwatch.berkeley.edu/current-sampling/ https://radwatch.berkeley.edu/current-sampling/ Are the two links of particular interest / relevance to naturally occurring radioactive materials, distinctions between fallout and reactor isotopic compositions and etc. (Broken links are all over the page because as I said, underfunded and mostly run by students these days)
- grapescheesee 5y agoSweet, thanks for the links and efforts. Do they have much for historical data available?
- jetsetgo 5y ago
- mwattsun 5y agoI wore a dosimeter in my 20's on a nuclear submarine and received some radiation exposure working on the reactor, but the Navy explained to me that it was balanced out because I was underwater and not receiving radiation exposure from the sun. 40 years later, and still cancer free, knock on wood. In a related note, I know someone who keeps bees and harvests honey. I recently visited the spot way out in the mountains where he does this and I asked why he chose a spot so far out. He explained that to get the organic label, the honey must contain no pesticides and if you keep bees around the property of other people they will ingest pesticides from flowers on those property, since pesticides are so commonly used.
- tata71 5y agoHow can we collate a list of all these committed people, and verifiably share their commitment to excellence?
- mixedCase 5y agoThe GP mentioned this is what the organic label requires, so you could use that as an indicator.
- natpalmer1776 5y agoNo idea if this comment was intended as humor but it had me chuckling.
- tyingq 5y agoAt least save whatever documentation you have. I have some letter from the military about various nasty organic solvents they had us use squirreled away somewhere.
- mwattsun 5y agoThey sent me something out of the blue a couple of years ago documenting my total radiation exposure. There must have been a law passed sometime.
- xyst 5y agoWhile the levels of radiocesium found in honey are not harmful to humans, I wonder if it has any deleterious effects on the bees themselves? Could this be a contribution to the "colony collapse disorder" we are seeing worldwide?
- dtech 5y agoNo, if that were the case it would have started in the 60's and gradually gotten better (bees have short lifespans). Instead, it's gotten worse and started much later. Pesticides are a much more likely explanation.
- freeflight 5y agoNothing stops these effects, even when they are minor, from ultimately compounding to such a degree that they have a major impact. In that context it's imho a bit weird how we humans always gotta have that one causation, when reality is usually extremely multi-causal and complex.
- Robotbeat 5y agoGotta disagree; actually a lot stops those effects. There are multiple mechanisms for DNA repair besides good old natural selection. Life developed in a mutagenic environment and there are natural sources of radiation all around us. Granite is measurably radioactive, for instance. Artificial radiation at much lower doses are not going to make a significant difference; they’re just very easy to detect because of the very precise energy signature they show on things like gamma ray spectrometers.
- themaninthedark 5y agoThey mention it might be having an effect but also stat the the level is about 10 times lower than in the 70's. So my guess is that unless a high level of radioactivity is good but low level is bad then it is not a major contributing factor.
- laserbeam 5y ago
- EarlKing 5y agoahem https://archive.fo/8SZos https://archive.fo/8SZos
- Krasnol 5y agoGermany still has significant radiation in wild boars (and mushrooms) from the Chernobyl fallout: https://www.umweltanalysen.com/en/wild-boar/cesium-137-contamination-of-wild-boars/ https://www.umweltanalysen.com/en/wild-boar/cesium-137-conta... > From September 1st, 2017 to December 31st, 2019, muscle meat samples from 376 wild boars were delivered by the forest services (Bodenmais 129, Dahn 123 and Zusmarshausen 124). So far, 355 samples have been measured for Cs-137 activity. The Cs-137 contamination of wild boars fluctuated seasonally depending on the availability of individual food components within a study area, with the variability of the measured values being up to three orders of magnitude. The values ranged from 0.6 Bq/kg fresh mass (FM) (Dahn) to 16,704 Bq/kg (Bodenmais).
- godelski 5y agoThis constantly gets brought up but few people run the numbers because you can safely eat kilograms of each a day. You can see the full calculations if you search my comments. The truth is just that we're really good at detecting radiation because doing so allows us to better detect weapons.
- deeg 5y agoHow does the radiation from boar meat compare to sunlight? E.g. eating 500 grams is similar to sitting in the sun for 5 minutes, in very rough comparison.
- pvg 5y agoIt mostly doesn't compare - sitting in the sun for five minutes doesn't expose you to much in the way of ionizing radiation as almost all of it is filtered out by the atmosphere. And when you get out of the sun, it stops. Radioactively contaminated food glows at your insides for much longer. Cs-137 biological half-life is weeks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesium-137#Health_risk_of_radioactive_caesium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesium-137#Health_risk_of_rad...
- godelski 5y agoRadiation is a pretty weird thing that is easily misunderstood because people use the same term to talk about very different things. While sitting in the sun will cause UV radiation and can result in skin cancer it's not the same as interesting cesium. Though both can cause cancer. But if we're just talking about increase chance of cancer iirc the meat calculations you need to eat like 15 kg of boar a day from that region (like 3kg if the highest measured). I'll let you make your guesstimate from there. And we're not even talking about risk of cancer from eating that much meat.
- newsclues 5y agoI often wonder if nuclear testing or fossil fuels is having a worse impact on humans and society. Maybe both are partly to blame for the madness
- godelski 5y agoFossil fuels. No question. We know the dangers of both very well. Only a handful of people have died from nuclear. More people die each day from climate.
- kube-system 5y agoNot to mention that the use of fossil fuels also releases small amounts of radioactive contamination directly into the atmosphere as a matter of normal use.
- ThinkBeat 5y agoUm he said "nuclear testing", not "nuclear power".
- trenchgun 5y agoHow many people have died from nuclear testing?
- godelski 5y agoHard to say tbh, but I'd wager less than a million. For comparison, that's about the yearly death rate (or rather early deaths, which is similar to how we attribute radiation deaths) from coal. Not fossil fuels, coal. The __magnitudes__ are vastly disproportional here. There's nothing to debate here except what we fear more. But our lack of fear over climate change is how we got here. Because the killer is slow moving and (mostly) invisible.
- drran 5y agoIt's a good argument to replace coal energy with clean energy, but why we should replace dirty coal with dirty nuclear?
- lmilcin 5y agoActually, nuclear fallout is present in everything. Following Trinity test and the rest of nuclear testing campaign, every single living thing or any matter that has been processed in any way has been contaminated and shows high background radiation (compared to pre-Trinity test). That's why some materials like steel from ships comissioned before Trinity test or lead ballast from sunken Roman ships is highly sought after where low background radiation material is required. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/10/search-dark-matter-depends-ancient-shipwrecks/600718/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/10/search-d...
- goatsi 5y agoFor lead the radioactivity comes from uranium mixed with the original ore, not from outside sources. That's why it needs to be hundreds or thousands of years old rather than just pre 1945. >All lead mined on Earth naturally contains some amount of the radioactive element uranium 235, which decays, over time, into another radioactive element, a version of lead called lead 210. When lead ore is first processed, it is purified and most of the uranium is removed. Whatever lead 210 is already present begins to break down, with half of it decaying on average every 22 years. In Roman lead almost all of the lead 210 has already decayed, whereas in lead mined today, it is just beginning to decay. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ancient-roman-lead-physics-archaeology-controversy/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ancient-roman-lea...
- secondcoming 5y agoProbably a stupid question, but wouldn’t all lead have started decaying at the same time? Why would lead only start to decay once it has been mined?
- coryrc 5y agoOnly lead 210 is radioactive. Lead 210 is only created by uranium. Lead 210 has a short half-life, uranium 235 has a long one. Thus, once uranium is removed, lead 210 levels drop "quickly".
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- xd 5y agoYou know what would be a really nice HN feature.. when you submit a URL it can be flagged as "pay per view" and I can have a profile setting to filter them out.
- encryptluks2 5y agoHN... Where all the techies use a janky website up talk about their non-janky web projects.
- tenebrisalietum 5y agoNo bullshit != janky. Janky is 50MB of Javascript that doesn't load all at once so things jump around ocnstantly at the start, only to display 1/3 of the text of an article before you insert 3 ads but I won't know that until I click past the cookie warning and the "Please subscribe" popup that happens when I scroll more than 100 pixels.
- encryptluks2 5y agoYou assume that when I say janky that I mean JavaScript. Sites can not have JavaScript and still be featureful when it comes to features and privacy. In this instance I was specifically talking about rate limiting responses and some of the censorship I see here.
- dcposch 5y agoExactly the opposite, actually. HN is an exceptionally clean, minimalist website. Instant page loads. No ads, no "accept cookie" banner, no autoplaying media, in fact no media of any kind, no engagement-maximizing algorithm. Quality moderation via dedicated human mods. Then everyone comes here to talk about their Svelte ESnext 69.0 x serverless kubernetes 3d metaverse animated gif NFT marketplace subscription-based growth hack horror they're about to inflict on the public.
- encryptluks2 5y agoYet you would never see me talking about JS being a positive when it comes to web design, but there is still a lot to be desired when it comes to HN.
- acidburnNSA 5y agoNuclear engineer here. In school in Ann Arbor we ran a radiation detector overnight in the lab and were able to identify several nuclides in the air leftover from weapons tests. Fun times. Of course the dose rate from these nuclides was many orders of magnitude less than natural background so it was more a curiosity than a concern. Radiation detectors can detect single atoms decaying and attribute them to specific nuclides. Good old quantum energy levels of the nucleus. If I could have one media wish this year, it would be that whenever someone says something is 'radioactive', everyone else asks what the dose rate is compared to natural background before talking about hazards.
- roenxi 5y agoSpeaking as a cheerfully untrained armchair observer, we might also expect the nuclear fallout to be detectable for at least the next 50,000 years [0] on the basis that detection equipment is really sensitive. Sensitive to the point where we can detect sunny days happening several millennia ago. This looks like silly news. They may as well just have run with "US did nuclear tests in the 1960s" or "radioactive cesium has a half life" and left it at that unless there is something to report on. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiocarbon_dating https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiocarbon_dating
- theptip 5y agoThis is the general point that most of the press and general public fail to appreciate when thinking about radiation risk. Similarly after Fukushima, there were terrified articles about how radiation could be detected in fish across the Pacific. But as you say, at what level? Certainly orders of magnitude lower than your baseline exposure. We just have very accurate detectors!
- acidburnNSA 5y agoIndeed, none of those articles said: "oh yeah and at these dose rates, you'd have to eat 330,000 kg of albacore to double your natural dose, and more than 10x more than that before you got a dose that has been shown to cause harm. Fewer clicks and shares I guess. https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2015-04-25-fish-from-fukushima.html https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2015-04-25-fish-from-fukushim...
- rikeanimer 5y agoIs bad understanding of dosimetry gonna be a thing now? I hope not. Cosmic microwave background radiation only makes your dick hard. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29761587 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29761587
- egberts1 5y agoI wonder if this unclaimed and unrecoverable nuclear bomb is the real culprit here in North Carolina. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1961_Goldsboro_B-52_crash https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1961_Goldsboro_B-52_crash
- dtgriscom 5y ago"Excuse me sir, is this your nuclear bomb?" "Let me look... no, doesn't look like any of the ones I'm missing."
- egberts1 5y agoIt’s not “missing”, just “unrecoverable “.
- nexuist 5y agoHow could it be the culprit? If nuclear material entered the groundwater supply it would be immediately noticeable and a major environmental catastrophe. It wouldn't just affect bees.
- egberts1 5y agoIt’s a marsh. Groundwater goes through that … easily.
- nexuist 5y agoI understand, what I'm saying is that if this did happen it would have been obvious to everyone that it did. The fact that nobody's drinking water is irradiated right now proves that it couldn't have happened... (Sidenote: is it really possible that after all these years they've just left a smashed nuclear bomb in a marsh? I would imagine they've gone back with better technology and recovered the pieces, at least to avoid the material falling into the hands of terrorists?)
- 29athrowaway 5y agoVeritasium has a cool video about a related topic titled "How Kodak exposed the atomic bomb". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pSqk-XV2QM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pSqk-XV2QM
- heyrhett 5y agoIt's wasn't a test. Someone just poisoned all the air. It's not a test to say "hey I'm going to poison all the air, let's see what happens". We shouldn't call this a "test" as if it was conducted by actual scientists doing actual experiments.
- nexuist 5y agoWho were these people then? To say that they weren't scientists is to say that scientists can never be held accountable because every "actual" experiment is morally and ethically righteous.
- heyrhett 5y agoMorality has nothing to do with it. There can't possibly be a control variable. Would you call someone who goes around smashing things a "scientist"? What is the experiment?
- nexuist 5y ago> It's wasn't a test. Someone just poisoned all the air. If you want to be pedantic: It was a test of if the air-poisoner-inator sufficiently poisoned the air. If the air was not poisoned then the experiment obviously failed. If the air was poisoned then the hypothesis was correct and the experiment succeeded. A bomb test tests if the bomb bombed the location it was meant to bomb with the correct amount of bomb. The control variable would be not dropping the bomb. > Would you call someone who goes around smashing things a "scientist"? Yes, automotive engineers do this every day to build safer cars, and anyone in the safety industry obviously replicates unsafe conditions (explosions, fires, electrical failures, chemical spills, etc) to test safety equipment. "Remember kids, the only difference between screwing around and science is writing it down” - Alex Jason
- heyrhett 5y agoPretty sure they were just screwing around.
- errcorrectcode 5y agoFallout is evident in nearly everything made with atmospheric air. It's possible to tell the difference between steel made before 1945 (low-background) and after due to radionuclide contamination. Items made prior to the end of WWII are unlikely to have such trace impurities.
- ycIsGarbage 5y agoYep, and apparently there's money in the old scuttled ships from before 1945. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel
- Nbox9 5y ago> Since the cessation of atmospheric nuclear testing, background radiation has decreased to very near natural levels,[4] making special low-background steel no longer necessary for most radiation-sensitive applications, as brand-new steel now has a low enough radioactive signature that it can generally be used in such applications Apparently there’s less money in those scuttled ships now than there was 50 years ago.
- errcorrectcode 5y agoI wonder what the isotopic fallout graphs look like.
- gcanyon 5y ago"at levels above 0.03 becquerels per kilogram" -- note that an average banana contains about half a gram of potassium, producing 15 Bq, or about 25,000 times the radiation from a typical serving of honey. I'm not sure if cesium sticks around in the body -- the potassium in bananas doesn't.
- Robotbeat 5y agoThat’s not true. Potassium is an essential mineral and our bodies are composed of it.
- gcanyon 5y agoThat doesn't change the fact that some potassium, in particular potassium-40, is radioactive, even in bananas, even in people: https://xkcd.com/radiation/ https://xkcd.com/radiation/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_equivalent_dose https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_equivalent_dose
- Robotbeat 5y agoOf course not. My whole point is that potassium, which is (except for extreme cases) radioactive due to Potassium-40, is an essential part of the human body. It does not “wash out.” Carbon itself is also radioactive, containing Carbon-14 that decays over time. Life and our bodies are and have been bathed in carcinogenic radiation (as well as other carcinogenic and DNA-damaging environmental factors) since the beginning of life on Earth. Every time you go outside, you are exposed to ultraviolet radiation on your skin and when you’re inside, cement and granite countertops and nuts and bananas expose you to radiation as well. It’s inescapable. So an extremist perspective on artificial radiation where even its detection is considered harmful is just innumerate and scientifically illiterate. It’s a kind of superstition if not related to levels of naturally occurring radiation.
- gcanyon 5y agoSorry, didn’t see this until now. To be clear, I’m arguing that the radiation in honey is almost certainly not of concern. I think we’re on the same side. That said, radium bioaccumulates because it subs in for calcium. You are over 2% calcium by weight, but you only take in about 0.1% of that mass per day. Potassium is about 0.2% of you, and you take in 2-3% of that daily. Meaning that radium almost certainly more dangerous to you than potassium.
- yrro 5y ago> disguising itself as a major nutrient Honey is a nutrient? I thought it was water + sugar?
- mk81 5y ago