Nuclear Weapon Tests Have Made Boars Too Radioactive To Eat

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

You may be surprised to know that Germany's wild boars are too radioactive to eat - and Chernobyl may not be solely to blame. Fallout from nuclear weapons testing decades ago during the Cold War is a significant contributor to that radiation, it turns out.

High levels of the radioactive isotope cesium-137 - or caesium-137 for those outside the US - found inside most animal species living in Bavarian forests have declined over time, except for wild swine. Scientists haven't been able to explain this so-called "wild boar paradox," though a team of researchers led by those at the Leibniz University Hannover may be one step closer to figuring out why.

They analyzed 48 wild boar meat samples to potentially pinpoint the source of the contamination. In 88 percent of the samples, the level of radiation from cesium-137 exceeded Germany's food safety limits of 600 Bq/kg. It's believed this radiocesium got into the boars' diet via truffles, which they root out from underground. The cesium-137 sinks down, is absorbed by the fungus, and then gobbled up by the pigs.

The radioactive cesium likely came from two possible sources: the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear reactor disaster, and nuclear weapons testing during that century. To check for this, and using a mass spectrometer, the university team calculated the ratio of cesium-135 to cesium-137 in the wild boar, and found the ratio high enough to suggest that, as the scientists put it, "nuclear weapons fallout contributes significantly to the notorious contamination levels in wild boars in central Europe that were previously believed to be dominated by Chernobyl."

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