> 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.
I'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=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.
I 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.
The 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)
> 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.
The issue isn't as much as the realized damage, it's the way it's been handled. Ask the people in charge at the time and Jülich never had any issue: it's deny, deflect, deter all the way.
So we're dealing with an industry that cuts corners whenever it feels like it, and received unlimited backing of politics by sweeping incidents under the nearest rug, and trampling over communities at will (see how the Wentland region was chosen to become a permanent storage site for nuclear waste).
In such an environment at some point any statistics are meaningless, even harmful: they drive home the point that in face of the nuclear industry and its political handling, the people are just a statistic. Why should the people put up with that?
Nuclear power in Germany wasn't a technical failing (for the most part), it was politics colluding with the industry in a way that evaporated any trust.
Nuclear technology is highly regulated for good reason (enriched uranium 235 isn't simply available "over the counter", for example), which increases the amount of trust required. It wasn't any particular incident that killed nuclear power in Germany, it was the inability to act responsibly.
That is true, but it also plagues all other energy-generating industries (both green and fossil), and in general I'd say virtually all industries. Incidents are denied and swept under the rug, environment and health effects are severely underestimated, both politicians and business are corrupt and alike. Humans are flawed and we have no others.
And then, the fact remains that air pollution kills millions of people every year and nuclear plants do not. "Acting responsible" in this circumstances means more nuclear.
That was the claim for the technology they developed at Jülich, too. And it does look good on paper.
Seriously, as long as you try to argue on technical merit, you're missing the point of the debate on nuclear power in Germany. It all came down to having to trust people who have demonstrated that they're not at all trustworthy.
> (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.
The 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”.
I 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."
The 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.
That 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.
They 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.)
It 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?
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.
As 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.”
Once 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.
In 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].
Burning 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.
Incinerators for waste have much stronger emission controls/scrubbers than power plants (eg the coal burning shit the Germans love) for… some reason I don’t actually understand.
If we were to eat them, surely some amount might end up as soil, but digestion and respiration means that a fair amount of the pig ends up being pumped into the atmosphere from our lungs.
You can think metabolism as a sort of intricately complex burning ritual.
Respiration is based on metabolism and the overwhelmingly prominent elements in human exhalation (exclusive of preexisting atmospheric components) are carbon (as CO2) and hydrogen (as H2O), neither of which are likely radioisotopic components of contaminated food.
Cesium would be excreted as solid waste, winding up in water treatment plant sludge.
For combusted carcasses, absent particulates (which could be largely trapped via scubbers), that would likely wind up principally as ash.
I was thinking that the complaint was primarily about the CO2, but your comment makes me realize that they could have been concerned about the radiation aspects in the air too...
Radioactive boar flesh, as with all other biomass, is already in the biosphere, that is, it is not fossilised carbon being reintroduced. Contributions to increased greenhouse gasses would effectively be net zero.
(Note that non-combusted boars are already expelling CO2 through respiration, as well as more potent gases such as methane through metabolism and decomposition of solid wastes. Methane production through human livestock is among the concerns of climate forcing, though I suspect wild boar populations are sufficiently small to not have a significant impact.)
Anyone 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.
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
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.