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Comment by godelski | Hacker News Reader

Did any of your food ever have dangerous levels of radiation?

There are still lots of boars in southern Germany that are far above the official threshold for consumption (which is quite high already), like, almost glow-in-the-dark.

Southern Germany is a long way from Chernobyl, but a substantial amount of the fallout rained down here. Pretty much nothing grown in the areas that got contaminated precipitation was safe to eat, sometimes for years. Milk was way too contaminated even after dilution with milk from other areas, and pretty high amounts of radionuclides accumulated in the bottom layers of sandboxes on playgrounds and other unexpected places.

No one knew at first though, the West German government kept playing down the incident even though they knew that fallout reaching Germany was a big possibility, and thus lots and lots of people got rained on who could have protected themselves (my mom for one, on the way to work, metallic taste and all)

That's a pretty important part of the anti-nuclear sentiment in Germany, by the way. That's why a lot of people simply won't trust the parties involved in running nuclear power plants to do so safely – because the system failed already in an incident that wasn't even a domestic one, and also because of the rampant corruption surrounding those plants and high-level politics in general.

Last time I ran through the numbers I was remembering that you'd have to eat a ridiculous amount of wild boar and/or wild mushrooms (assuming all were irradiated) on a daily basis to even approach dangerous levels.[0]

These stories make the rounds and constantly sound dangerous but the fact is that people just don't understand nuclear physics. I mean why would they? Everyone isn't taking college level physics classes, let alone ones on medical physics. If I wrote an article about how radiation levels in tuna doubled after the Fukushima disaster then people would stop eating tuna. This literally happened even though that doubling was to 5Bq/kg and Japanese limits are 100Bq/kg (US is 1.2kBq/kg). The fact is that our instruments for detecting radiation are extremely sensitive. You can measure radiation in everything. Yeah, the tuna got more radioactive after Fukushima, but that doesn't mean they got more dangerous. That's not how it works. And I'm tired of people that know absolutely nothing about nuclear physics talking as if they are experts on radiation. Both people in the pro and anti-nuclear camps do this and neither are helping.

[0] Cs137 has a dose factor of 0.014mSv/kBq and the high radiation had 600Bq/kg. So that's 0.0084mSv/kg of boar. European rose limit is 20mSv/yr, so that's 6.5kg of boar a day. And we need to note that 20mSv is well within the safety limit. 1 Sv is a 5.5% chance increase of cancer within your lifetime (LNT model which over estimates), so that's 6.5kg (14.3lbs) of boar a day to raise your lifetime risk of cancer by 1% (body shows to actually deal with these low levels of radiation fine).

Edit: If you're eating 14lbs of wild meat every single day, you probably have larger health issue than a 5% increased risk of cancer in your lifetime (the meat is probably giving you a higher chance of cancer).

For context, a typical banana has about 15 Bq of activity (with a dose factor about a third of CS137).

I think it is really arrogant to assume that you know what the dangerous levels are, and to claim that under a certain level is not dangerous or harmful.

Time and time again, this type of thinking has been proven naive at best, and often criminally misleading: synthetic food additives, tobacco, opiate painkillers, radiation, leaded gasoline, and many, many more.

When it comes to the health of myself and those close to me, I'm going to err on the side of caution, and disregard what the "official numbers" say.

> I think it is really arrogant to assume that you know what the dangerous levels are, and to claim that under a certain level is not dangerous or harmful.

Really? Because I have a degree in physics, studied radiation, and worked for years on radiation transport simulations and shielding. I think I have an above average knowledge of radiation physics and the effects on the human body.

> synthetic food additives, tobacco, opiate painkillers, radiation, leaded gasoline, and many, many more.

I mean yeah, don't trust Shell, Marlboro, or Purdue about their own products. Listen to the actual scientists. Because each of these examples has cases like these where there were other scientists demonstrating how these things were harmful. And each of these cases got political and a bunch of non-experts fought referencing papers they didn't even know how to read. Spoiler, there's no "big nuclear."

> I'm going to err on the side of caution, and disregard what the "official numbers" say.

Cool. But eating 3kg (6.6lbs) of wild boar a day is an absurd amount and under half of what I said was the "official numbers." Even 1kg/day (2.2lbs) is ludicrous. You're going to have way more health problems if you're eating that much boar every day. Be cautious. I'm not saying don't. I'm saying that you could be stuffing your face all day and you wouldn't come anywhere near "official numbers". You're going to kill yourself if you're eating 15lbs of meat every day.

> Really? Because I have a degree in physics, studied radiation, and worked for years on radiation transport simulations and shielding. I think I have an above average knowledge of radiation physics and the effects on the human body.

That is exactly what makes you an unrealiable source in my eyes, because you are biased towards the "we know what we're doing" perspective.

You know a little more than others, but you think you know a lot, enough to make others' decisions and opinions for them.

Don't trust scientists, got it.

Don't trust a scientist with a narrow and limited scope and worldview.

> There are still lots of boars in southern Germany that are far above the official threshold for consumption (which is quite high already), like, almost glow-in-the-dark.

Citation needed. A wild boar doesn't live more than 10-15 years, so that's three generations removed from 1986. Bioaccumulation doesn't work like that. And glow-in-the-dark is pure nonsense obviously.

The "atomkraft nine donkey" movement has a lot of similar horror stories, few of which have a factual basis. They even made their bad fiction stories about the dangers of nuclear powerplants compulsory reading for grade school kids. No wonder a good chunk of otherwise level headed Germans are brain washed with these lies.

Boars consume lots of mushrooms, which accumulate Cesium very well, hence these boars may end up with lots of Cesium in their systems. This is covered in German media pretty much every year, but I can't find much in English on the topic. [1] is the best I could unearth quickly:

> For example, it is also possible to have 2020 samples of wild boar from the same hunting ground simultaneously below 100 Bq Cs 137 per kg but also of several thousand Bq/kg. In addition, large seasonal variations in contamination can also occur in an area.

1: https://www.umweltanalysen.com/en/wild-boar/cesium-137-conta...

You may be interested in my comment above where I calculate the dosage you'd get. Your source shows something different than the source I used (which said 600Bq). But the high of your source is 16,704 Bq/kg, which means you need to eat 85.5kg (188.5lbs) of boar in a year to reach European dose limits (20mSv). That's a 0.234kg/day (over half a pound). That's a lot of meat to be eating a day. And that is the highest reading they found. But the median they found in that same area was 2,857 Bq/kg. That equates to needing to eat 1.37kg/day (3 lbs) to reach limits.

Note that this is also assuming that you receive a full dosage from your consumption, which isn't how it'd work in practice, so these numbers are conservative.

I'm not saying that you should go out and eat a bunch of wild boar, but that you have to be eating pretty much a high protein diet and almost exclusively on wild boar to even get close to yearly radiation limits (US limits are 50 Sv/yr btw, and even that level is not linked to increased rates of cancer). Though eating that much red meat every day is probably going to have other health problems (including likelihood of cancer) unrelated to radiation. It is recommended that you have less than 70g of red meat a day. I mean if you eat a hamburger every day (1/4 lb / 113g) no one would question you getting health problems and you're still under half the EU limits even when eating the most radioactive boar (16,704 Bq/kg) measured (less than a tenth if you're eating a medium boar (2,857 Bq/kg) from the most radioactive area (Bodenmais)).

You kinda have to actively try to get radiation sickness through boar consumption. The same is true for mushrooms.

Maybe interesting for context about distribution of affected areas, and to which degree, german only, sorry.

[1] http://www.umweltinstitut.org/aktuelle-meldungen/meldungen/2...

The Sachsenwald near Hamburg has (had?) elevated levels too. Though that could have other reasons, because the GKSS is near. Where when some questions because of leucemy clusters in children and allegiations of nuclear experiments arose, the government downplayed, too. Including a file cabinet of the local fire brigade burnt down, by guess what, a fire in the local fire station!

He, sure...

edit: downplay https://www.presseportal.de/pm/7840/804878

Yes, that is why we were testing it.

If you're talking about boars and mushrooms, then I'm guessing not. You'd have to eat an absurd amount of meat and mushrooms every day to accumulate enough dose to go over your yearly limits, and you still wouldn't get anywhere near radiation worker limits. We're talking at least a hamburger every single day in the worst case scenario, and let's be real, that much red meat is going to cause other serious health problems.

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