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Radioactive Wild Boars Still Roaming the Forests of Germany
An anonymous reader writes 28 years after the Chernobyl accident, tests have found that more than one in three Saxony boars give off such high levels of radiation that they are unfit for consumption. In 2009 almost €425,000 ($555,000) was paid out to hunters in compensation for wild boar meat that was too contaminated to be sold. "It doesn't cover the loss from game sales, but at least it covers the cost of disposal," says Steffen Richter, the head of the Saxon State Hunters Association.
"Wild boar are thought to be particularly affected because they root through the soil for food, and feed on mushrooms and underground truffles that store radiation. Many mushrooms from the affected areas are also believed to be unfit for human consumption. "
That's pretty interesting. Chernobyl was a long time ago.
Wouldn't the trichinosis already be irradiated anyway? Just think of the radiation as a 'very-slow-roasting' system. The meat is practically falling off the bone before the animal is even dead.
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For the humor-impaired, this is a joke.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
Since a lot of hog hunts are done at night, the slight glow should make the boars a lot easier to see
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
hmm...
Assuming all of the radioactivity is due to Cs-137, that 600 Bq/kg limit translates to 0.0000003 micrograms of Cs-137 in any given kg of wild pork.
Okay, I can buy the argument that that "safe" limit errs on the side of caution a bit much....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
I don't think the prevailing winds matter all that much: it is the winds in the first days after the accident that matter, since during that time the radioactive particles were still in the air. I know that here in the Netherlands (west of Germany) in the months after the accident some types of crops were destroyed because they were considered unsafe for consumption.
hmm...
Assuming all of the radioactivity is due to Cs-137, that 600 Bq/kg limit translates to 0.0000003 micrograms of Cs-137 in any given kg of wild pork.
Okay, I can buy the argument that that "safe" limit errs on the side of caution a bit much....
The real problem from a meltdown isn't really the radiation. While that's scary and all... the real problem is what else is released and what the shorter half life elements decay into. Most of what the control rods are made out of are horrific heavy metals, and during the Chernobyl incident the Russians panicked and dumped large amounts of liquid lead and cement laced with lead into the basement of the reactor. The lead boiled off and then rained back down all over the region. If I lived in the area, I'd be more concerned about that lead than I would be about the radiation.
It looks like the limits are in line with most of the world.
Those are for overall food radiation levels. If you ate wild pork for 100% of your diet, those numbers would be important. But wild boar is something that is eaten infrequently. It is like mercury in tuna. If you are pregnant, and eat tuna everyday, it is a concern. Otherwise, a tuna sandwich a few times a month is harmless.
Disclaimer: I am a vegetarian, and eat neither tuna nor wild boar. But I do eat bananas, which contain enough radiation to occasionally trigger radiation alarms.
What are we speaking of ? 2 time the normal acceopted level (aka, really low but still declared unfit under the linear model , but way less than living in a granite mountain ?), or are we speaking very high ? Also what is the isotope here ? The linked article certainly is as uninformative as it gets.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
1) germany apparently forbid anything above 700 bq/Kg , whereas otehr country do it at 3000 Bq/Kg.
2) Average contamination in 2009 was 7000 Bq/Kg in the highiest contaminated area.
I wish the article could have told that.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
No, 700 miles is pretty close. 850 would be more closer though, it's about 1300 km.
Nope, indeed Dresden IS about 15000 miles or so EAST of Chernobyl. And about 800 miles WEST of it.
Apparenlty Cs-137 is the radionuclide of concern and 600 Bq/kg is the threshold for safety. The committed dose equivalent per unit intake for ingested Cs-137 is 1.35e-8 Sv/Bq (Eckerman, Limiting Values of Radionuclide Intake and Air Concentration and Dose Conversion Factors for Inhalation, Submersion and Ingestion, EPA-520/1-88-020, September 1988, Table 2.2, p. 166). This works out to be 8.1 uSv/kg at the threshold. To accumulate an effective dose of 1 mSv (100 mrem) a year, which is the US limit for a dose to the general public and apparently also the German limit, would require eating 123 kg of wild boar. That's a lot of pig.
Also I'm sure that idiot Merkel decided to close all their nuclear power stations because she thought they'd get nice cheap gas from russia. Hmm, wonder how thats working out for her now...
At the peak, German nuclear generation was 133 TWh in 2011. Since then, German renewables generation has grown from 47 TWh/year to 178 TWh/year, Germany can now meet demand without any nuclear and without additional gas imports.
I'm sorry the facts broke your narrative.
Ann Coulter. Not even up to politician level of smug idiocy, she's a Fox News talking head/moron.
Ann Coulter is a political Kim Kardashian. She thrives on drawing attention to herself by acting like an idiot. But her statement is a tiny kernel of truth wrapped up in a big ball of stupidity. Slightly higher levels of background radiation may actually be good for you. There is some evidence, in both animals and humans, that slightly higher levels of external (not ingested) radiation, over extended time, can reduced cancer rates and improve health. One hypothesis is that the radiation "exercises" the cellular repair mechanism, and keeps if functioning well.
Well, since Dresden is in Germany and Germany is in the EU, going the long way around is usually how it's done...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It's the green disease.
Pseudo-environmentalism (the thing practiced by the likes of Greenpeace) mixed with misinformed NIMBYism.
People who speak up against this are labeled haters of the environment. Meanwhile, the greens degenerate into ever more radical forms of pseudo-environmentalism.
Any engineer with half a brain and some knowledge on the subject immediately concludes that nuclear power is by far the better realistic option. However, society is not made up exclusively of engineers.
This kind of environmentalism is based on faith, and not on science. It should therefore be called a religion and lumped with the other populist delusions.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
If you knew EU bureaucracy, you'd get the joke.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Also I'm sure that idiot Merkel decided to close all their nuclear power stations because she thought they'd get nice cheap gas from russia. Hmm, wonder how thats working out for her now...
At the peak, German nuclear generation was 133 TWh in 2011. Since then, German renewables generation has grown from 47 TWh/year to 178 TWh/year, Germany can now meet demand without any nuclear and without additional gas imports.
I'm sorry the facts broke your narrative.
Why do I get this funny feeling that the "178 TWh/year" figure is from the rated capacity factors and not the actual production?
How do you explain this then?
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
That's kinda like advocating playing the lottery because even a single ticket could win millions.
It is, have fun getting your vitamin D without radiation.
Uranium is similar in toxicity to lead, for what it's worth, disregarding radiation and decay products and whatnot.
I don't remember hearing anything about dumping lead on the thing? I can't see it as being worse than living within 1000mi of a smelter anyway. The smelter in sudbury puts out 150 tons of lead into the atmosphere per year. Radiation was definitely the main concern.
Sent from my PDP-11
The radiation is harmful to wildlife but no where near as harmful as plain old human habitation. Wildlife thrives in the Chernobyl exclusion zone not because the radiation is harmless but because there are no people. The DMZ on the korean peninsula is the same, no people, plenty of land mines and wildlife.
BTW: Coulter is a troll and Greenpeace did not kill nuclear power, Chernobyl did that, yes there were exceptional circumstances as there was with the BP oil spill but Joe Average doesn't give a shit about excuses when the inevitable mega-fuck-up occurs.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Why do I get this funny feeling that the "178 TWh/year" figure is from the rated capacity factors and not the actual production?
Because you are an idiot? But for all idiots the old saying is true: google.com is your friend.
I must be one of the idiots because I cannot find your 178 TWh/yr production either.
However, I can get close to that. Looking here:
http://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/e...
I see this:
"The first half of 2014 was marked by mild temperatures and high electricity production from wind and
solar energy. Solar power plants have increased their production compared to the first half of 2013 by
28%, while wind power grew about 19%. In June solar systems have produced twice as much electricity
as wind turbines. In the first half of the year solar and wind power plants together produced more than
45 TWh or approximately 17% of the net electricity generation. The renewable energy sources solar,
wind, hydro and biomass produced a total of about 81 TWh and accounted for approximately 31% of
the net electricity production. The renewable share of the gross electricity production including the
industrial power plants is approx. 28%."
That's the first half of 2014, so twice that is 162 TWh.
However, tis statement of yours is wrong "Germany can now meet demand without any nuclear and without additional gas imports."
They can't do that this year or the next.
By way of comparision, in the USA during 2013, we produced 522 TWh with renewables
http://www.eia.gov/electricity...
ooo, look, I included links for my assertions instead of just pulling numbers out of my hat.
So again, we ask: where did you get your number of 178 TWh?
I'm confused by the text you quoted as coming from a parent comment. I cannot find that text in the parent comment, and AFAICS comments are not editable once posted, so that means it was never there. Where did you find this:
> Which means this is nothing but a hunter subsidy. Like whaling for Japan where their excuse is "whales eat all the fish".
And about the subsidy, juts for the record, since the text is there and I cannot find the quoted comment to reply to:
The articles says the compensation is just enough for disposal of the dead animals, it isn't even a compensation for missed earnings had they sold the meat. And I can tell you selling that meat would not a problem, people like buying wild animal meat. So the statement makes no sense at all, except to show that ideology often blinds ones reasoning abilities.
are you showing all comments? rated -1 even? because I hit quote parent button. I browse at all comments shown and it shows up for me.
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
"WE DON'T WANT NUCLEAR POWER!"
Who is "we"? A bunch of noise making 20 something hippies?
must be. I'm German and I don't have anything against nuclear power. BTW I have to confirm that part of the upbringing of little children here in the past three decades has involved a lot of anti-nuclear resentments being fed to them not by their science teachers, but, funnily enough, by all the rest of the faculty who like to comment on issues they don't know anything about. One vivid memory from my own time in school was our (catholic) religious education teacher not willing to believe that the steam exiting the cooling tower of a nuclear power plant is not actually a radioactive smoke plume coming from some sort of fuel rod camp fire at the bottom of the tower! Until we managed to convince her she had probably already taught generations of children before us that kind of hogwash.
Of course it is not, and Sweden does not belong to the EU as far as I know. In the EU the level is 600Bq/kg. ... must be because it belongs to the most server irradiated areas (south Sweden at least)
Surprising that the level is so high in Sweden
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I am afraid to tell you that you are mistaken, Sweden is a member of the EU.
In Norway which is not a member of the EU the levels for Cs 137 in wild game is 3000 Bq/kg.
It does sound somewhat silly. However, the problem isn't that renewables can't work (they do work!) - they're just not enough, unless we start coating every surface in solar panels. Research and development can alleviate this problem by increasing efficiency, but ultimately, there's a thermodynamic limit.
That's where the "(unless the laws of Physics would be broken)" part comes in. A solar panel on every rooftop will not satisfy power needs.
On the other hand, it is absurd to say "Nuclear power can never be safe" - one of the guy's arguments. That's the same as saying that putting people inside aluminum tubes flying close to the speed of sound can never be safe.
Accidents will always happen - this applies universally. We must be proactive and learn from our mistakes to avoid future mistakes.
Funny how the activities with greatest perceived danger are actually the safest in their realms.
I don't know exactly what the EU regulation says, but it could be that they allow for different levels for regular food stuff, and food stuff gathered from nature (mushrooms, berries and game). At least that's the divide that the Swedish levels go by. The limts is Sweden for regular food stuff is 300 Bq/kg, and for wild game, mushrooms and berries it is 1500 Bq/kg.