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Cesium-soaked truffles may keep fallout in an environment’s food web
- boxed 3y agoI just by default doubt any anti-nuclear thing that comes out of Germany. 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.
- PaulHoule 3y agoThey are definitely not saying it comes from German NPP. Makes me wonder though if wild pigs have the flavor of truffles. (You better believe the taste of chicken eggs depends on what they eat or that the complex flavor of venison has to with the random stuff wild animals eat. Turns out truffles really love Cesium.)
- fullspectrumdev 3y agoWild pig has a certainly different taste to even farm pigs given a lot of space. I wouldn’t say it’s a taste of truffle though, it’s just a different, stronger flavour (that I quite like).
- ceejayoz 3y agoNothing in "be careful eating wild boar" and "don't blow up nuclear bombs in the atmosphere" is going to affect Germany's CO2 emissions.
- hedora 3y agoThe original article says that a surprising amount of the radiation comes from WWII munitions. 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”.
- akolbe 3y agoI can't find any reference to WWII munitions in the original article. What they are talking about are atmospheric nuclear tests carried out primarily in the period after WWII: "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."
- mschuster91 3y ago[dead]
- pgeorgi 3y agoThe source for Germany's CO2 emissions is a pro-coal-miner stance, not an anti-nuclear position: Germany happily threw away a 120k workers strong photovoltaics industry while protecting a 40k workers strong coal mining industry. 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)
- badpun 3y ago> (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.
- alexey-salmin 3y ago> 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. 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.
- Incipient 3y agoIn the same way I wouldn't feel entirely safe driving around in a car from the 60s, nuclear reactor design has come a long way since then. And considering how absolutely ancient the Japanese reactors are, they came incredibly close to not failing. Anything modern simply wouldn't have.
- 3y ago
- tcfhgj 3y agomaybe there is a way to sell the pigs to you instead of disposing them? This would certainly reduce carbon emissions due to life stock farming
- captainmuon 3y agoThe trade-off Germany chose is not between using nuclear vs. producing more CO2. It is between using nuclear vs. reducing economic activity (and the latter is IMHO very dubious - despite many warnings, Germany is able to procure enough energy just fine). 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.
- alexey-salmin 3y agoThat is simply false, both short-term and long-term. 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.
- mschuster91 3y agoIn case you wonder just what happens to all the dead pigs the hunters shoot each year (about 100k/a): the fat ends up as biodiesel, the carcasses are burnt to power cement plants and waste incinerators [1]. [1] https://www.augsburger-allgemeine.de/bayern/Augsburg-Entsorgung-von-verstrahltem-Wild-Nuklear-Schweine-in-Diesel-id24418196.html https://www.augsburger-allgemeine.de/bayern/Augsburg-Entsorg...
- tcfhgj 3y agoso instead of eating them we pump it into the atmosphere? :(
- fullspectrumdev 3y agoI mean, do you want to eat radioactive meat? 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.
- mschuster91 3y agoBurning it is not problematic in itself, the question is if radioactive particles are scrubbed from the exhaust stream, and what happens to the solid slag.
- tcfhgj 3y agono, I don't want to eat it. But I don't want to inhale it either.
- JoeAltmaier 3y agoAgreed. But it did start in the air; presumably it will return to the ground soon.
- fullspectrumdev 3y ago
- seanhunter 3y agoI surely can't be the only one who hears "radioactive boar" and thinks "superhero origin story".
- klyrs 3y agoThe adventures of Captain Boaring, whose superpower is the ability to smell mushrooms? I'll pass.
- seanhunter 3y agoHe may not be the most interesting superhero, but he is amoung the most bristly. Don't knock it until you see the artwork! Also I hear there is an "Asterix" crossover coming, although Captain Boaring only gets a small part.
- hedora 3y agoProbably should link the original article. I wouldn’t have expected incorrect headlines and article summaries from Science, but here we are. 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 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.
- akolbe 3y agoIn what sense are the summary and headline incorrect?
- bigfryo 3y agoKeep pumping out that scare propaganda
- ngcc_hk 3y agoDon’t know some German wild boar is so dangerous to eat. Is there other area and other animal like that.
- derfuchs 3y agoAs the linked german article states: “Wildschweine sind deshalb von Strahlung stärker betroffen als andere Waldtiere, da sie sich von Pilzen ernähren, die Cäsium besonders anreichern, das 1986 nach der Katastrophe von Tschernobyl vor allem über Bayern niederging.” 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.”
- dvh 3y agoAre wild boards from neighboring countries immune?
- Symmetry 3y agoIt would be helpful to get some numbers as to how radioactive this boar meat is. Bacon is a known minor carcinogen, would bacon made from these boars be 100 times as carcinogenic as normal bacon? 1% more?
- akolbe 3y agoThe abstract of the underlying study[1] says: 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. [1] https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acs.est.3c03565 https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acs.est.3c03565
- progrus 3y agoAnyone who eats pork anyway should have no problem with this meat either. 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) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friends_of_the_Earth_(US)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- z_ack 3y agoI'm wondering why there is no measurement, no data about the radiation detected. All in our environment is a little bit radioactive, it's called background radiation : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Background_radiation#:~:text=Background%20radiation%20is%20a%20measure,deliberate%20introduction%20of%20radiation%20sources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Background_radiation#:~:text=B.... A scientific article without any reference to measurements or at least a comparison with background radiation is criticisable. I'll say the obvious but, it the legal limit is near to the background radiation level, all became not safe. Anyway, what about the truffles and other mushrooms of that region ? For logic deduction, they should be unsafe, too.
- akolbe 3y agoFor reference, the underlying study[1] says: 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. [1] https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acs.est.3c03565 https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acs.est.3c03565
- pgeorgi 3y ago> Anyway, what about the truffles and other mushrooms of that region ? For logic deduction, they should be unsafe, too. They are: https://www.bfs.de/SharedDocs/Pressemitteilungen/BfS/DE/2023/007.html https://www.bfs.de/SharedDocs/Pressemitteilungen/BfS/DE/2023...
- exabrial 3y agoOnce again: from a weapons program, _not_ a power generation program... yet power generation gets all the flak and are currently being torn down in Germany, while... they still have nuclear weapons.
- civilitty 3y agoWhile Germany does host US nuclear weapons through a nuclear sharing agreement [1], it doesn't have any of it's own and can't use them directly. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_sharing#NATO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_sharing#NATO