Radioactive Boar On the Rise In Germany 165
Germans who go out in the woods today are sure of a big surprise, radioactive boars. A portion of the wild boar population in Germany was irradiated after the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown, and the boars are thriving. In the last two years government payments to compensate hunters for radioactive boar have quadrupled. From the article: "According to the Environment Ministry in Berlin, almost €425,000 ($555,000) was paid out to hunters in 2009 in compensation for wild boar meat that was too contaminated by radiation to be sold for consumption. That total is more than four times higher than compensation payments made in 2007." I think the Germans are overlooking just how much money there is to be made from regenerating bacon.
Re:What????? (Score:3, Interesting)
Here's something that will really baffle your puny American mind:
http://www.farmersguardian.com/home/livestock/scotland%E2%80%99s-chernobyl-sheep-no-longer-radioactive/32935.article
Re:What????? (Score:1, Interesting)
to all the nutt cases who think that "Nucular is the new green energy".... ... When Chernobyl blew up we (i lived in bavaria at that time) got a healthy dose (pun intended) of fall out from the wind drift.
It was in fact so bad that no agricultural products could be sold that year, public playgrounds closed, and people generally were advised to not go outside.
(and when they come back in, to decontaminate their shoes)
I bought a geiger counter and was amazed that the lettuce from our garden was more radioactive than the "calibration probe" which came with the counter.
Most of it was radioactive iodine which had a half life of 30 days, but it was BAD.
In fact so bad that german milk powder was classified as radioactive waste, and had to be stored in radioactive containment to cool down the Iodine.
Most of the stuff left now is Caesium which will be with us for a few generations, and it accumulates in forests, because trees act as pesky little "air filters" trapping dust and such on their leaved and dropping it to the ground.
The german season for wild mushrooms ended in April 1989.
for good.
Thanks to Russia
and THANKS to the NUCLEAR LOBBY
(OH THE IRONY.... the captcha for posting this post was "neighbor"... gotta love it.
Re:The mind boggles (Score:3, Interesting)
And, yes, such an animal exists. They are called "boar."
(see also "sheep" in the UK, which have the same issue with Chernobyl fallout, and "reindeer" in certain Nordic regions, not to mention carnivores in a lot of places)
Lichen (aka. reindeer chow), fungi (loved by boar) and certain other plants (probably including the grasses or some other plant that sheep eat a lot of) are apparently great radioactivity concentrators.
Fortunately, C137 has a half life of about 30 years, not tens of thousands, so in a few hundred years the radioactivity remaining in most animals should be low enough that this isn't a problem any more. As long as we keep building reactors safely and running them to standards such that they don't blow up, we'll only glow when it's REALLY dark.
The German nuclear industry also has problems (Score:3, Interesting)
IMHO nuclear power requires a kind of long-term thinking that is utterly alien to modern politicians and industry managers.
Case in point: Back in the 1980s there was a political decision to develop an old salt mine (Gorleben [wikipedia.org]) into a long term storage for highly radioactive waste. But today it seems that the major reasons for that decision were
A) Gorleben was close to the Border to East Germany
B) The people there would be grateful for any jobs and would keep voting for the conservative parties forever
Geology seems not to have influenced the decision very much, which is a pity as a similar testing facility (Schacht Asse [wikipedia.org]) developed great problems.
Only a few decades later, those criteria seem irrelevant today, and yet the stuff will be dangerous for thousands of years.