Radioactivity hike seen in northern Europe; source unknownski

[C-Man 26536]

https://y.yarn.co/895e460b-9e2b-4cdf-9fd7-8ac50020b54c.mp4?1593360924176

[ChiTownDoc 20840]

22 hours ago, Onboard 2.0 said:

Yep I've got the whole international covid issue, earthquakes in Mexico, Saharan death dust marching over the US, rioting in cities, familial alcoholism, a bat shit crazy brother and sister in law it seems, and my dad has now been diagnosed with probably inoperable pancreatic cancer which has seemed to trigger the brother and SIL for some bizarre reason.

Bring on the radiation fallout, and radiation, zombie mutants !!!!!!

Shit man.  Very sorry to see this.  Best of luck.  

[Onboard 2.0 9083]

33 minutes ago, DDD Dad said:

Very sorry to hear about this.  I lost my father to stomach cancer 9 years ago.  

It's a bitch. His mom, my grandmother died of stomach cancer.

[ScottS 1039]

Necro bump.  Seems relevant to this thread.

A group of radioactive boars are trotting through Europe

Quote

A group of radioactive boars are trotting through Europe

They may not be three-eyed, but not even Mr. Burns would want to eat these pigs.

Encountering a radioactive wild boar in the dark forests of Germany isn’t top of everyone’s bucket list. But, while their populations have been soaring in Europe, it’s not meeting, but rather eating them, that you need to worry about. That’s because they contain unsafe radioactive cesium (a liquid metal).

Their mysteriously high radioactivity levels have been puzzling scientists. Now we know why their radioactivity won’t go away.

The shaggy, tusked pigs roaming around the forests of Germany and Austria were thought to have been made radioactive by the 1986 Chernobyl accident. In fact, scientists from the Vienna University of Technology, in Austria, now show that Oppenheimer-style nuclear weapons testing is responsible for their long-lasting radioactivity.

“We were stunned to see that the nuclear weapons fallout still impacts the ecosystem to such great extent”, the paper’s corresponding authors Dr Georg Steinhauser and Dr. Bin Feng told BBC Science Focus.

When nuclear weapons explode or nuclear energy is produced, radioactive cesium is created. When it enters the environment, it can threaten human health – and did just this when the Chernobyl power plant exploded in Ukraine almost four decades ago.

But the study, published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, shows that the radioactive contamination affecting the boars was also caused by atmospheric nuclear weapons testing by nations across the world in the 1950s and 1960s.

Both events contaminated the radioactive boars’ food sources, including underground truffles.

Cesium-137 used to be present in other game animals, but these levels have dropped. However, the boars are plagued by cesium-135, a longer-lived form of the radioactive metal.

The scientists measured cesium levels in boar meat from southern Germany using a gamma-ray detector. They compared levels of cesium-135 and -137 using a mass spectrometer (a tool used to measure the charge of ions) to find out where the radioactivity came from.

The researchers knew that detecting a higher ratio of -135 than -137 would indicate more fallout from nuclear weapons explosions rather than nuclear reactors – and that’s what they found. Across the samples, between 10 to 68 per cent of the contamination came from nuclear weapons testing.

Eighty-eight per cent of the meat samples exceeded safe levels of radioactivity in food.

“It is a cautionary tale that the long-forgotten atmospheric nuclear weapons tests and their fallout still cast a shadow on the environment,” Steinhauser and Feng told BBC Science Focus. “Just because they took place 60 years ago doesn’t mean that they no longer impact the ecosystem.”

May or may not be relevant.

 

[Parliament 13979]

...radioactive wild boar in the dark forests of Germany...contain unsafe radioactive cesium (a liquid metal).

Terminator 6 is gonna be lit!

[gsoda3 3187]

why is the -135 so long lived in only boars? is it the truffles that's the culprit?  i believe only boars eat truffles (out of the animals we eat anyway). 

[Captainant 26861]

1 hour ago, gsoda3 said:

why is the -135 so long lived in only boars? is it the truffles that's the culprit?  i believe only boars eat truffles (out of the animals we eat anyway). 

I think it's the consequence of concentration - the truffles are underground and have a cellular structure apt to hold onto the radioisotopes and are part of the decomposition chain, so it stands to reason that they would be more radioactive. If the boars are eating more of the truffles, they're getting a concentrated dose of radioactive material and concentrating it even further, which would make them quite spicy

[Pescado_Rojo 19193]

2 hours ago, gsoda3 said:

why is the -135 so long lived in only boars? is it the truffles that's the culprit?  i believe only boars eat truffles (out of the animals we eat anyway). 

Are you suggesting I should stop eating Truffles? Because you can have my truffle fries when you pry them from my dead, glowing hands. 

[Biff Tannen 44921]

This is wild

[gsoda3 3187]

1 hour ago, Captainant said:

I think it's the consequence of concentration - the truffles are underground and have a cellular structure apt to hold onto the radioisotopes and are part of the decomposition chain, so it stands to reason that they would be more radioactive. If the boars are eating more of the truffles, they're getting a concentrated dose of radioactive material and concentrating it even further, which would make them quite spicy

makes sense.  i don't remember germany testing nuclear bombs inside their borders though so this is surprising.  maybe the nazis were conducting more research than we know about.

[Captainant 26861]

8 minutes ago, gsoda3 said:

makes sense.  i don't remember germany testing nuclear bombs inside their borders though so this is surprising.  maybe the nazis were conducting more research than we know about.

Chernobyl dropped radioisotopes allllllll over Europe, and the Soviets did quite a few air tests until the treaty ban on em

[gsoda3 3187]

1 hour ago, Captainant said:

Chernobyl dropped radioisotopes allllllll over Europe, and the Soviets did quite a few air tests until the treaty ban on em

well they thought it was from chernobyl but them finding -135 isotopes (from nuclear weapons explosions) on such a consistent basis showed it was from something else.  i know the russians tested lots of nuclear weapons but i don't believe any of them were in germany.  if the fallout was from russian tests in the motherland wouldn't a whole slew of other countries in between germany and russia be affected also?

[Captainant 26861]

8 hours ago, gsoda3 said:

well they thought it was from chernobyl but them finding -135 isotopes (from nuclear weapons explosions) on such a consistent basis showed it was from something else.  i know the russians tested lots of nuclear weapons but i don't believe any of them were in germany.  if the fallout was from russian tests in the motherland wouldn't a whole slew of other countries in between germany and russia be affected also?

I think you're jumping to conclusions based on a reading of that original article - the Russians didn't test nukes in Germany, but atmospheric fallout can spread a long long way. And the black forest seems to be a sponge for radioactivity to boot. The article mentions concentration via fungi as a probable mechanism though 

¹³⁷Cs levels in wild boars have not shown a significant decline trend since 1986. (20,25) In certain locations and instances, the decline in contamination levels is even slower than the physical half-life of ¹³⁷Cs. (26) This phenomenon has been termed “wild boar paradox” and is generally attributed to the ingestion of ¹³⁷Cs accumulating hypogeous fungi (e.g., deer truffle, Elaphomyces) by wild boars. (27,28) Depending on the soil composition, especially clay mineral content, (29) these underground mushrooms are a critical repository of the downward migrating ¹³⁷Cs. They are one major food item for wild boars, particularly during winter when food on the surface is scarce. (30) However, due to the lack of convincing evidence for identifying the sources of ¹³⁷Cs, the origins of the persistent contamination in wild boars remains unclear