I work alongside a team that maintains and repairs these things, and they certainly aren't made for high levels of digital security. If you know the right place to stick a flash drive in a portal monitor sure you could do damage to it, I can attest it isn't fancy. But it doesn't have to be.
For one, a portal monitor is a last line of defense against radioactive contamination being tracked around. We aren't talking about huge levels of radiation, the contamination is managed by good safety practices (work plans, electronic dosimeters, maps of potential loose contamination, etc.). But there is a responsibility to ensure that a worker doesn't accidentally drag anything home with them to the general public, no matter how insignificant. Which is really what the monitors are for.
For two, there are usually multiples of these things in a row, inside a heavily fortified concrete area surrounded by unfriendly looking men with machine guns (at least at any nuclear facility, a school or small lab that has one would be different). Combine those two things, and an attempt to "hack" monitors would be about the most moronic waste of resources any government would ever spend. You couldn't do any real damage, you couldn't hurt anyone... at best you could get a radiation protection manager fired for allowing a small uncontrolled release of radioactivity, or a miscalculated dose rate to a worker.
I'm all for security, but there needs to be a little perspective. Standalone portal monitors that are airgaped don't need to be a digital fort knox. The level of effort is extreme to screw with them, and the payback would be insignificant. The truth is most specialized lab/nuclear equipment isn't extremely secure unless it serves an actual security function (a CDA, critical digital asset, which are almost always network isolated and have more robust security). Quite the opposite, most of it is very simple and made to be maintained almost indefinitely by moderately skilled technicians. Cost, usability, and maintainability is more important.
Yeah the referenced article at a glance gave a detection rate, not a level for most of the claims. As someone that deals with minimal detectable concentrations for a living, it looks like they were dancing right at their detection limit. Which is fine, as long as you don't misconstrue what those numbers mean.
It does read very much like an advocacy piece though, particularly where it goes on to criticize the government for regulating concentrations based on what is achievable versus what is the minimum absolute safe quantity. Basically up in arms that there isn't a total ban on lead in food. Which shows a pretty startling lack of understanding of the biosphere and why regulations are structured that way.
First, I'll preface with this: my lab mostly monitors for radioisotopes like cesium, but the game is pretty much the same. Certain plants preferentially scavenge heavy metals; its a sort of natural confusion in their biochemistry. They're looking for things they need to grow, like iron. They really aren't that selective, because most of the heavy stuff in the soil will be things they need to grow, so there isn't really active filtration of "bad stuff" from a human perspective. The plant doesn't care. As a rule of thumb, anything that sets down large deep roots is a good candidate for this (root vegetables, trees, etc.). Grasses tend not to, although it varies a lot based on the type of grass. Water based plants are another exception (like rice), as heavy metals tend to wash into water basins and settle into silt.
Where I see this manifest most is oak trees in my line of work. There are large oak forests on the eastern seaboard of the US that had decent quantities of radio cesium dropped on them from weapons testing. The oak trees suck that metal into their leaves like a sponge, then at the end of the year the leaves fall off and rot into the topsoil, and the metal is captured again the next year. It never settles out and gets buried due to this re-suspension, and so oak leaves are some of the most radioactive things you'll find in the USA (depending on where you live).
In this food study, you're seeing a lot of that. Root vegetables aren't going to be just high in lead, they'll be full of all kinds of stuff. The fruit is going to vary by type, but they'll all have some as well. Purely non-rice grains should have comparatively little, due to shallow root structures among other things (the metal naturally will work its way down out of the topsoil in many cases, so the shallower you set your root the less of it you'll see from a plant perspective). It will also vary based on the year: plants set deeper more extensive root systems based on temperature and rainfall, so the same species in a cool drought year might have a radically different concentration of metals from the same species in the same location in a wet warm year.
Anyway, the reality is we pumped large quantities of this shit into our environment for decades. Lead mostly from gas, other metals from chemical refining, etc. Lead is the big one, as it was so ubiquitous. There really is no escaping it, and that's why the regulatory limits are set as they are. You can't expect there to be non of it, and it's extraordinarily difficult and fickle to try and control given how incredibly variable the factors can be. Take wheat. You can't test every truckload of wheat for metal content, it isn't feasible given the analyses and timescales involved. When you test off a wheat barge going to a cereal plant, you're looking at an aggregate sample from an entire region. Some fields in that region may have little to no metals, some may have a ton, and in reality most probably have trace amounts. You can't filter the metals out, the product you would have left wouldn't be food in the classical sense. So... you live with it. You set a limit you think can be achieved on average, and test out the back end (the food product itself). The food producer can test the raw ingredients themselves for protection, can try to structur
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I work alongside a team that maintains and repairs these things, and they certainly aren't made for high levels of digital security. If you know the right place to stick a flash drive in a portal monitor sure you could do damage to it, I can attest it isn't fancy. But it doesn't have to be.
For one, a portal monitor is a last line of defense against radioactive contamination being tracked around. We aren't talking about huge levels of radiation, the contamination is managed by good safety practices (work plans, electronic dosimeters, maps of potential loose contamination, etc.). But there is a responsibility to ensure that a worker doesn't accidentally drag anything home with them to the general public, no matter how insignificant. Which is really what the monitors are for.
For two, there are usually multiples of these things in a row, inside a heavily fortified concrete area surrounded by unfriendly looking men with machine guns (at least at any nuclear facility, a school or small lab that has one would be different). Combine those two things, and an attempt to "hack" monitors would be about the most moronic waste of resources any government would ever spend. You couldn't do any real damage, you couldn't hurt anyone... at best you could get a radiation protection manager fired for allowing a small uncontrolled release of radioactivity, or a miscalculated dose rate to a worker.
I'm all for security, but there needs to be a little perspective. Standalone portal monitors that are airgaped don't need to be a digital fort knox. The level of effort is extreme to screw with them, and the payback would be insignificant. The truth is most specialized lab/nuclear equipment isn't extremely secure unless it serves an actual security function (a CDA, critical digital asset, which are almost always network isolated and have more robust security). Quite the opposite, most of it is very simple and made to be maintained almost indefinitely by moderately skilled technicians. Cost, usability, and maintainability is more important.
Yeah the referenced article at a glance gave a detection rate, not a level for most of the claims. As someone that deals with minimal detectable concentrations for a living, it looks like they were dancing right at their detection limit. Which is fine, as long as you don't misconstrue what those numbers mean.
It does read very much like an advocacy piece though, particularly where it goes on to criticize the government for regulating concentrations based on what is achievable versus what is the minimum absolute safe quantity. Basically up in arms that there isn't a total ban on lead in food. Which shows a pretty startling lack of understanding of the biosphere and why regulations are structured that way.
First, I'll preface with this: my lab mostly monitors for radioisotopes like cesium, but the game is pretty much the same. Certain plants preferentially scavenge heavy metals; its a sort of natural confusion in their biochemistry. They're looking for things they need to grow, like iron. They really aren't that selective, because most of the heavy stuff in the soil will be things they need to grow, so there isn't really active filtration of "bad stuff" from a human perspective. The plant doesn't care. As a rule of thumb, anything that sets down large deep roots is a good candidate for this (root vegetables, trees, etc.). Grasses tend not to, although it varies a lot based on the type of grass. Water based plants are another exception (like rice), as heavy metals tend to wash into water basins and settle into silt.
Where I see this manifest most is oak trees in my line of work. There are large oak forests on the eastern seaboard of the US that had decent quantities of radio cesium dropped on them from weapons testing. The oak trees suck that metal into their leaves like a sponge, then at the end of the year the leaves fall off and rot into the topsoil, and the metal is captured again the next year. It never settles out and gets buried due to this re-suspension, and so oak leaves are some of the most radioactive things you'll find in the USA (depending on where you live).
In this food study, you're seeing a lot of that. Root vegetables aren't going to be just high in lead, they'll be full of all kinds of stuff. The fruit is going to vary by type, but they'll all have some as well. Purely non-rice grains should have comparatively little, due to shallow root structures among other things (the metal naturally will work its way down out of the topsoil in many cases, so the shallower you set your root the less of it you'll see from a plant perspective). It will also vary based on the year: plants set deeper more extensive root systems based on temperature and rainfall, so the same species in a cool drought year might have a radically different concentration of metals from the same species in the same location in a wet warm year.
Anyway, the reality is we pumped large quantities of this shit into our environment for decades. Lead mostly from gas, other metals from chemical refining, etc. Lead is the big one, as it was so ubiquitous. There really is no escaping it, and that's why the regulatory limits are set as they are. You can't expect there to be non of it, and it's extraordinarily difficult and fickle to try and control given how incredibly variable the factors can be. Take wheat. You can't test every truckload of wheat for metal content, it isn't feasible given the analyses and timescales involved. When you test off a wheat barge going to a cereal plant, you're looking at an aggregate sample from an entire region. Some fields in that region may have little to no metals, some may have a ton, and in reality most probably have trace amounts. You can't filter the metals out, the product you would have left wouldn't be food in the classical sense. So... you live with it. You set a limit you think can be achieved on average, and test out the back end (the food product itself). The food producer can test the raw ingredients themselves for protection, can try to structur