Probably should link the original article. I wouldn’t have expected incorrect headlines and article summaries from Science, but here we are.<p>The original title is:<p>Disproportionately High Contributions of 60 Year Old Weapons-137Cs Explain the Persistence of Radioactive Contamination in Bavarian Wild Boars<p>The link is: <a href="https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acs.est.3c03565" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acs.est.3c03565</a><p>From the abstract:<p>> <i>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>
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 : <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Background_radiation#:~:text=Background%20radiation%20is%20a%20measure,deliberate%20introduction%20of%20radiation%20sources" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Background_radiation#:~:text=B...</a>.
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.<p>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.
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?
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].<p>[1] <a href="https://www.augsburger-allgemeine.de/bayern/Augsburg-Entsorgung-von-verstrahltem-Wild-Nuklear-Schweine-in-Diesel-id24418196.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.augsburger-allgemeine.de/bayern/Augsburg-Entsorg...</a>
Anyone who eats pork anyway should have no problem with this meat either.<p>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.<p>And here is your yearly reminder that Friends of the Earth was founded with a donation from Robert Orville Anderson, an oil baron: <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friends_of_the_Earth_(US)" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friends_of_the_Earth_(US)</a>