American Honey Is Radioactive From Decades of Nuclear Bomb Testing (vice.com) 133
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: The world's nuclear powers have detonated more than 500 nukes in the atmosphere. These explosions were tests, shows of force to rival nations, and proof that countries such as Russia, France, and the U.S. had mastered the science of the bomb. The world's honey has suffered for it. According to a new study published in Nature Communications, honey in the United States is full of fallout lingering from those atmospheric nuclear tests.
For the study, researchers collected honey samples from more than 100 hives and soil samples from 110 locations across the Eastern United States. The scientists found elevated levels of cesium in both the soil and honey samples. "While most of the radiation produced by a nuclear weapon detonation decays within the first few days, one of the longest-lived and more abundant fission products is [cesium] , which has a radioactive half-life of 30.2 years," the study said. Previous research after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster identified elevated levels of cesium in European honey and pollen. The good news is that, according to researchers, most of this honey is probably safe for humans to consume. "While the concentrations of [cesium] we report in honey today are below the...dietary threshold level of concern observed by many countries, and not evidently dangerous for human consumption, the widespread residual radiation...is surprising given that nearly 2 half-lives have elapsed since most of the bomb production of [cesium]," they said. Interestingly, the researchers "also found an inverse relationship between the amount of potassium naturally occurring in soil and the amount of fallout found in honey," the report says. "Southern states contained three times the amount of fallout that the northern states did. Southern soil doesn't contain much potassium while soil in the north is rich with the stuff. While this honey is probably safe for human consumption, it may not be for the bees who generate it."
For the study, researchers collected honey samples from more than 100 hives and soil samples from 110 locations across the Eastern United States. The scientists found elevated levels of cesium in both the soil and honey samples. "While most of the radiation produced by a nuclear weapon detonation decays within the first few days, one of the longest-lived and more abundant fission products is [cesium] , which has a radioactive half-life of 30.2 years," the study said. Previous research after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster identified elevated levels of cesium in European honey and pollen. The good news is that, according to researchers, most of this honey is probably safe for humans to consume. "While the concentrations of [cesium] we report in honey today are below the...dietary threshold level of concern observed by many countries, and not evidently dangerous for human consumption, the widespread residual radiation...is surprising given that nearly 2 half-lives have elapsed since most of the bomb production of [cesium]," they said. Interestingly, the researchers "also found an inverse relationship between the amount of potassium naturally occurring in soil and the amount of fallout found in honey," the report says. "Southern states contained three times the amount of fallout that the northern states did. Southern soil doesn't contain much potassium while soil in the north is rich with the stuff. While this honey is probably safe for human consumption, it may not be for the bees who generate it."
Yummy (Score:5, Funny)
My favorite!
The radiation makes your teeth whiter too. Reference: https://io9.gizmodo.com/seriou... [gizmodo.com]
Re:Yummy (Score:4, Funny)
"Bee-Beam Honey gets glowing reviews!"
650 generations later (Score:1, Informative)
It may not be safe for the bees?
Honey bees live 2-6 weeks. The nuclear tests were *hundreds of generations ago*.
That's like saying the great pyramid at Giza might kill off the humans.
Re:650 generations later (Score:5, Informative)
Try reading the text maybe? Many of the byproducts (such as cesium) and things irradiated by the tests stay radioactive for a long time, so honey bees born today can still collect radioactivity by consuming or going near that stuff. You didn't know that?
As for the pyramids, who knows -- maybe a future war may start over who owns the pyramids and then escalate. WWIII has to start someplace doesn't it?
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You and the bees get more dangerous radiation and radionuclides from fossil fuels, concrete blocks, cosmic rays..and etc and etc.
The honey is nothing.
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Don't know about curses but mummies don't have any special levels of radioactivity. There was brief hooplah about that in the 1990s, but was later found to be entirely due to museums basements and mummy cases collecting radon same as your mother's basement. WIth proper ventilation mummy radiation went to background levels, to sum it up they have zip zero nada extra radiation.
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As for the pyramids, who knows -- maybe a future war may start over who owns the pyramids and then escalate. WWIII has to start someplace doesn't it?
Does it really matter where it starts when the end result of that madness, could be a planet-sized parking lot?
"Oh you really like those pyramids do you?"
* tosses nuke *
"There ya go. Enjoy your speed bump."
Re: 650 generations later (Score:5, Insightful)
So cesium (and anything else radioactive) gets LESS radioactive over time, not MORE. By necessity - releasing energy means that energy isn't in cesium anymore.
Which means, bees today are getting far LESS radiation from it than their parent, grandparents, great grandparents, going back 650 generations of bees. They've done alright for 650 generations with MORE cesium radioactive. What makes you think that LESS is suddenly going to be a huge problem?
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Well, sounds like we're headed for a cesium gap.
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Duh. The cesium in honey doesn't come from the bees or their parents. Cesium in honey comes from the pollen they collect in the wild. This shows that cesium is lingering in the environment even decades after the nuclear bomb tests.
30 years (Score:2)
We already KNOW the half-life of cesium. It's 30 years.
Half-life means it decays by half every 30 years.
So there is 25% as much as there was 60 years ago.
We know *precisely* how long it "lingers". That's how atomic clocks work. Literally, the very most accurate timing measurement we have in whole world is how long it "lingers". Kaka the rate of decay by emission).
That's not news.
The only "news" here is that some moron thinks that 75% LESS cesium is going to somehow be catastrophic for bees, when MORE wasn'
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In a very simple understanding you may be correct, however we don't live in a simple world. The fact that cesium shows up in honey at all shows that it's still there, since cesium decays into a metastable barium when it spins off that gamma ray. And since the bee didn't just go pick up some cesium off the ground, it's been absorbed by a plant that the bee grabbed some nectar from, probably in replacement for the potassium the plant was really looking for.
That also means that there is a good chance other b
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Not to mention the fact that most bees do not breed. They have Queens.
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It makes a hard man humble.
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That's like saying the great pyramid at Giza might kill off the humans.
These are landing pads for snake like aliens that take over Humans, so... yeah.
Re:650 generations later (Score:4, Informative)
It may not be safe for the bees?
Honey bees live 2-6 weeks. The nuclear tests were *hundreds of generations ago*.
That's like saying the great pyramid at Giza might kill off the humans.
Ironically enough, if colony collapse were to occur en masse today, hundreds of generations later, it probably would kill off quite a few humans.
We need honeybess far more than they need us.
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Ironically enough, if colony collapse were to occur en masse today, hundreds of generations later, it probably would kill off quite a few humans.
We need honeybess far more than they need us.
I hear that and every time no one goes any further ... Care to elaborate?
The claim is that humans need bees as pollinators of food to survive. It's total nonsense. The vast majority of human-consumed calories are from grains, either directly in bread, rice, or noodles, or indirectly from eating animals. All grains are wind pollinated. They're relatives of grasses, and humans plant them in such vast numbers that an armada of bees couldn't possibly pollinate it all. But they don't try. Grasses have no nectar, which is what bees are after.
The only things which humans eat whic
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I don't feel we're 's gift to this Earth and deserve to completely wreck up the place with our time here, but attitudes like that make me feel like a lot of people feel this way. So while I get that the claims of environmentalists that extinction or endangering of species could somehow really hurt us might actually be technically false, I still don't think that's a good justification to NOT try to prevent it anyway.
I admit, I've developed quite an attitude against several of the claims of modern environmentalists. They cloak themselves in scientific trappings and then lie to the world. Either that or they have no earthly idea how farms work. I will be generous and attribute their nonsense to ignorance rather than malice. That doesn't make it any less bullshit.
There has always been a divide between urban and rural and modern environmentalist bullshit has been making it drastically worse. With such displays of abje
Re: 650 generations later (Score:4, Insightful)
Honeybees are born from queens. They have 1 generation per year. It's 59 generations since the last atmospheric test in the USA and 70 since the first. Bees have not been doing that well since then. A causal relation cannot be entirely excluded.
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Honeybees are born from queens.
Honeybees are hatched from eggs laid by queens. They are not born.
This has been Captain Pedantic, signing off.
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honeybee queens live 2-3 years:
https://www.google.com/search?... [google.com]
Also, queens only mate once in their life (one mating flight).
So maybe 23-35 generations?
Re: 650 generations later (Score:2)
They may live longer than a year but they create fertile offspring within a year. So one generation per year.
Re: 650 generations later (Score:3)
For a beekeeper you know very little about honeybees. What you call generations are not generations. They're all brothers and sisters and even though the firstborns are already dead by the time the last are born, that does not make them a new generation; (perhaps in beekeeper jargon but not in the normal biological meaning of the term). It takes a queen to start a new generation. Also, I know about the varrao mite. Its existence does not rule out cesium having an effect too.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Re: 650 generations later (Score:4, Informative)
We can actually build sufficient nuclear power plants much quicker than we can build the astronomical amount of alternatives we'd need. Both will be much too late, though. Nevertheless, anything we build now prevents 20 times the emissions that something built in 20 years will. So we must definitely deploy as much PV and wind as we can. But for the long run, including nuclear really is a very good idea. Also, nuclear is cheaper than pv+wind+massive amounts storage with the exception of pumped storage capacity, but that is quite limited...
Actually, we CAN'T build sufficient nuclear power (Score:2)
Nuclear reactors are too slow to build and too expensive to run, [reuters.com] even when disregarding disposal of nuclear waste.
And that's on top of the security issues, both regarding accidents AND a slight problem of providing unstable or nonfunctional countries with nuclear power.
Which would be a necessary prerequisite of using nuclear power to stop global warming by digging up and refining radioactive ore so the energy within it could be released into Earth's atmosphere in the form of steam.
Which isn't a very efficie
Re:Actually, we CAN'T build sufficient nuclear pow (Score:4, Informative)
1. The numbers used there fail to include storage in the cost of pv+wind and thus are nonsensical.
2. The price of nuclear used there is 3 times as high as the actual price for electricity from recent nuclear power plants.
3. Nuclear currently is much more expensive than it needs to be because we practically need to restart the entire industry.
4. Even Chernobyl is a piece of cake compared to the radioactive output of coal plants we need to keep running worldwide because it will take decades to replace them with something else.
5. Even if nuclear were really more expensive, delaying a solution for global warming, which not building nuclear power plants is, is much more expensive. Economic arguments should come secondary in fixing this clusterfuck.
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Oh please child. Go get yourself a lollypop. (Score:2)
Don't suck on the nuclear industry'd dick. It'll give you cancer.
1. The numbers used there fail to include storage in the cost of pv+wind and thus are nonsensical.
We could go into all the costs not mentioned with regard to nuclear industry from mining and refining to massive subsidies and permanent security issues but why bother. You already ignored that.
So I'll just quote Forbes and ScienceMag [sciencemag.org] here on how solar AND batteries bury even the best possible estimates for nuclear. [forbes.com]
2. The price of nuclear used there is 3 times as high as the actual price for electricity from recent nuclear power plants.
NOPE!
Non-Nuclear Options Save More Carbon Per Dollar. Nuclear new-build costs have been on the rise for many years (see previous WNISR editions).
Just in the past five years, U.S. solar and wind prices fell by two-thirds, putting new nuclear power out of the money by about 5-10-fold (see Nuclear Power vs. Renewable Energy Deployment).
Nuclear new-build costs many times more per kWh, so it buys many times less climate solution per dollar than major low-carbon competitors-efficiency, wind and solar.
Newer technologies do not change this: in the latest nuclear designs, so-called Gen-III+ reactors, ~78-87 percent of total costs is for the non-nuclear part.
Thus, if the other ~13-22 percent, the "nuclear island", were free, the rest of the plant would still be grossly uncompetitive with renewables or efficiency.
That is, even free steam from any kind of fuel or fission is not good enough, because the rest of the plant costs too much.
The business case for modern renewables is so convincing to investors that the latest official U.S. forecast foresees 45 GW of renewable additions from mid-2019 to mid-2022, vs. net retirements of 7 GW for nuclear and 17 GW for coal.
3. Nuclear currently is much more expensive than it needs to be because we practically need to restart the entire industry.
NOPE!
It's far more expensive cause it is SUPER-inefficient.
Think about if for a second and you'll realize that it is the sam
Yes, and so are bananas. (Score:4, Insightful)
And cigarettes. And coal. And everything.
But: HOW radioactive?
Re:Yes, and so are bananas. (Score:4, Informative)
The article says "The concentrations of 137Cs we report in honey today are below the 50–100Bq / kg dietary threshold level of concern observed by many countries, and not evidently dangerous for human consumption."
They seem to be worried about the health of the bees, not people.
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insects are tougher than us when it comes to radiation though. Honeybees in Chernobyl exclusion zone did suffer less fertility, 35 percent of normal... but that's crazy high levels of radiation compared to this honey. and they still do their honeybee thing!
Re:Yes, and so are bananas. (Score:4, Interesting)
It comes from the complexity of the DNA I believe. Insects are far simpler biologically and thus their DNA doesn't code for as much and is much more redundant, thus can tolerate a lot more errors before failing. Insects also generally have very short lifespans measured in days or weeks so the effects of damaged DNA might not have time to manifest. And given the reproduction of insects is often only by a queen or so, it also means if the insect's DNA is damaged, it's not propagated onwards unless the queen or her male cohorts are affected.
Among insects, cockroaches would be the first to die in a nuclear blast - they are complex insects.
Re: Yes, and so are bananas. (Score:2)
Just want to say, I think "proximity" beats out DNA complexity or even IF you have DNA when it comes to the lineup against a nuclear "blast".
But I understand what you meant.
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Cockroaches can still take fifteen times the acute dose a human can. Their cells don't divide as often. Radiation from "nuclear blast" is very short ranged.
Re:Yes, and so are bananas. (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes [honey is somewhat radioactive], and so are bananas. And cigarettes. And coal. And everything.
I understand some instruments used for carbon-14 dating are built with a radiation shield consisting of a chunk cut from a WW II navy gun barrel. That's because the steel, with the carbon in it, was smelted before the atmospheric nuclear tests released enough carbon 14 to make modern steel unsuitable as a radiation shield for this purpose.
Re: Yes, and so are bananas. (Score:3)
There's also been a big business salvaging Greek and Roman ship wrecks as they often had iron as cargo, as well as ship parts made of iron.
Bananas are 10x Deadlier (Score:3)
So.. what you are really saying is that bananas are 10 times deadlier than radioactive honey??? OMG!!!!
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That's . . . astounding! How big is his head, and how do they all climb in there without causing massive blood loss?
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Oh makes perfect sense.
Re:Yes, and so are bananas. (Score:4, Interesting)
It actually says in the summary. "Most" of it is safe for human consumption.
The real question is how much of the stuff that isn't safe gets into the food chain. They have a similar problem in Fukushima, most of the produce and most of the land is safe, but identifying the parts that are not is difficult and prevents people living there.
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And cigarettes. And coal. And everything.
But: HOW radioactive?
(Coal) "Woah, hold up there. Don't lump me in with those two. No one is dumping radioactive fertilizer on me. I'm all-natural."
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Numbers (Score:5, Informative)
From the study,
Using low background gamma spectrometry, we found detectable 137Cs (0.03Bq 137Cs kg1=105.94 atoms tablespoon1) in 68 of 122 distinct honey samples sourced from North America.
One becquerel is one decay per second.
Here's the unavoidable banana equivalent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Since a typical banana contains about half a gram of potassium, it will have an activity of roughly 15 Bq.
Check my math, please,
The average Florida wildflower honey had 3.4 Bq/kg, so you would have to eat 4 kg of that honey to equal one banana.
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but most decays of Cesium-137 make a gamma while 10% of the potassium-40 ones do... though the potassium one has twice the energy.
Some apples to oranges there still.
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Not questioning your math, just the formatting that got stripped.
Re: Numbers (Score:3)
You're forgetting one minor thing: cesium is mildly toxic. Radioactivity not being a problem does not mean cesium by itself is not. Nevertheless, it also doesn't mean it is.
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Potassium is regulated in the body, any excess will be expelled and it is kept in areas where the small amount beta radiation won't do you any harm.
As your own link mentions "in practice, this dose is not cumulative, as the principal radioactive component is excreted to maintain metabolic equilibrium."
The honey contains Cesium-137, which can accumulate in parts of the body where it can do harm.
How much honey do bees eat? (Score:2)
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Your math isn't the issue. Richard Feynman's criticism on the "safety factor" on the shuttle's O-rings applies:
Re: Numbers (Score:2)
But what if you were a platypus?
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Finally an explanation! (Score:5, Funny)
People said I was CRAZY when I told them my tea was self-warming...
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And your comment just made me spit mine out !
Congrats.
Clarifications that obfuscate (Score:2)
Nice of vice.com to "redact" the original nature.com article for the presumably isotope-challenged, leaving absurd statements like this:
"... [cesium], which has a radioactive half-life of 30.2 years...”
You gotta bee kiddin' me (Score:1)
If it's based on potassium, really not that much to worry about. Bananas do the same thing. There's a chart out there that explains just how little radiation you get from a banana vs. radiation that really matters.
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Sorry. I saw some buzz about bananas and paid more attention to the hive mind than the summary.
derp (Score:2)
So is every cell in your body. So what?
good thing about eating honey (Score:3)
When you eat honey the Caesium is taken out of the environment and into you. At least reducing the contamination by that tiny little amount. Versus the dumb way of simply letting pollen fall wherever and never collect it.
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When you eat honey the Caesium is taken out of the environment and into you...
So, when people say WE are "saving the planet", it's quite literal.
(Mother Nature) "Thank you for your sacrifice. You ah, kinda deserve it at this point."
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People gripe about the impositions expected of us by kooky environmentalists. If all we had to do was eat more honey and bananas I think the push back would disappear.
Reassured (Score:1)
"Most is probably safe!" The most reassuring thing I've read all day!
From..nuclear testing..? (Score:5, Insightful)
"the widespread residual radiation...is surprising given that nearly 2 half-lives have elapsed since most of the bomb production."
It seems that after reviewing the comments here, the actual radioactive levels are being compared to a single banana, and thus quite low.
I'm more focused on the comment above. Unless we truly don't understand the half-life of cesium, why exactly do we feel this radiation, was from nuclear testing? The article states "cesium", but my understanding is there are elements of that which occur naturally, and also elements that are the result of nuclear activity (cesium-137). It just seems like if we're that far removed from nuclear testing, there might be another reason we're still detecting elevated levels today.
We're almost 2 "half" lives removed, so what happens when that's 4 "half" lives? Or 8? We going to re-define the half-live of cesium, or perhaps stop pointing the finger at nukes?
The other scary part about this, is colony collapse. Here we are almost 60 years after stopping massive nuclear testing, and we're just now starting to understand the impact on bees. I wonder what we ignorant humans would have done had we inadvertently nuked honeybees from this planet long ago? We talk a lot about the impact of that, and yet if we would have caused it, we would have been screwed. (We'd still be screwed.)
We're damn lucky honeybees appear to be more related to cockroaches than we thought.
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Instead, after one half life, one half of the original amount remains, and after two half lives, one half of one half remains, or 1/4 of the original. Meaning, each successive half life iteration halves the re
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The summary was confused as well:
the widespread residual radiation...is surprising given that nearly 2 half-lives have elapsed since most of the bomb production of [cesium]
They're quoting someone, presumably a scientist. Do they really not know why we use "half-life" instead of just "life time"? I thought they taught the concept in high school.
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You're marked troll but maybe you're just very confused? Specifically, I think you misunderstand what half life means, with regards to exponential decay. You seem to think that it takes two "halves" for something to completely disappear. That makes intuitive sense from the language but is incorrect. Instead, after one half life, one half of the original amount remains, and after two half lives, one half of one half remains, or 1/4 of the original. Meaning, each successive half life iteration halves the result of the prior iteration, so for example after four half lives, there'd be (1/2)*(1/2)*(1/2)*(1/2) remaining, which is 1/16th of the original amount.
Thank you for the clarification. All that said, was there a reason to write an article about "OMG! radiation!" when it appears the calculated risk from honey is approx. 4kg to one banana? At that rate, smoothie stand operators should be deemed mass terrorists for the amount of toxic bananas they're slinging. Odd how no one is writing fearmongering articles about radiating infants with banana-based baby food. Perhaps honey just happened to be the sweet, sweet clickbait trap and flavor of the day.
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Imagine a solution containing potassium of typical isotopic ratios being used to water a banana plant in an isolated system. A banana grown from this tree will not exhibit the same isotopic ratio of potassium but instead the concentration o
Re:From..nuclear testing..? (Score:5, Informative)
This one is actually pretty straightforward. There's hardly any natural production of cesium-137 - only trace amounts come about from the natural decay of uranium (238U). On the other hand, we know that cesium-137 is an abundant product of nuclear explosions (and accidental releases from power plants). The radiation produced by 137Cs is well characterized: gamma rays with an energy of 0.6617 MeV. You could think of that gamma emission as a characteristic "color" of the decay: if you detect that energy/color, it almost certainly came from cesium-137. And if you find it out in the world (as opposed to near the nuclear power plant), it is almost certainly left over from the development of nuclear weapons.
I suppose what the researchers found surprising isn't that there's still cesium-137 left over from the atmospheric tests of the 50's and 60's - you can find it the world over if you look - but that it was being taken up and concentrated in plants and then, by extension, in honey.
What happens when it is more half live removed ? (Score:3)
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The other scary part about this, is colony collapse.
Colony collapse is the consequence of using neonicotinoides. All other factors contribute a bit, but none as much as those bugkillers.
That you read so much about other factors is because the producers of neonicotinoides decided years ago to fund an avalanche of studies that should lay the blame on everything but neonicotinoides. It is similar to what happened with the cigarette industry a few decades before. They use science to bury the really relevant insights in order to keep raking in their profits.
I
Dunning-Kruger Radiation (Score:5, Insightful)
According to Fig.5 in the referenced paper, the radiation dose from cesium was no more than 3.5 times background potassium radiation, and in 90% of samples was below background radiation. In 2/3 of samples it was at least 10x lower than background radiation.
Now, background radiation itself varies. They found the highest cesium where there was the lowest soil potassium, meaning... 3.5 times the *lowest* background radiation.
It's like being the smartest person in a room full of idiots. It doesn't actually make you smart in absolute terms. But it's enough to let you write an article for Vice.
What's this honey's name? (Score:2)
Nuclear weapons are not the same as nuclear power (Score:2, Interesting)
Good job everyone for not making this an excuse to bring up more FUD about nuclear power.
I do find it interesting that they are mentioning the cesium in the environment from open air nuclear weapons tests but not much about nuclear power accidents, even though the nuclear power accidents were far more recent. Am I getting this right? There's more radioactive cesium in the environment from nuclear weapons testing two half lives ago than from the more recent Chernobyl and Fukushima accidents?
We can detect t
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Depends on where you are sampling, and when. There were lots of atmospheric tests, and that fallout was (after years) distributed pretty uniformly worldwide. Folks downstream of Chernobyl and Fukushima definitely had greater exposure to cesium-137 (and other nasty radionuclides, like iodine-131) than from the "background" from nuclear weapons test
cesium-137 vs potassium-40 (Score:2)
I downloaded the paper's supplementary datasheet (excel file) and for context the radioactivity of the cesium-137 that is the focus of the paper is 1 or 2 orders of magnitude below the radioactivity from naturally-occurring potassium-40 in the honey. So absolutely no cause for health concern.
Example of "correlation is not causation" (Score:4, Insightful)
Interestingly, the researchers "also found an inverse relationship between the amount of potassium naturally occurring in soil and the amount of fallout found in honey," the report says. "Southern states contained three times the amount of fallout that the northern states did. Southern soil doesn't contain much potassium while soil in the north is rich with the stuff.
This strikes me as a shining example of correlation without causation:
- The soil in the southern states has lower potassium levels than that in the northern states. This is due to geologic and weather factors over a past interval on a geologic time scale.
- The fallout is higher in the southern than the northern states because the US atmospheric tests were conducted primarily at the Nevada Test Site, at their approximate latitude. The prevailing winds were from the west, and the tests were generally done when the wind was in its usual direction, toward Indian reservations and Mormon areas (such as St. George Utah), and times when the wind was toward Los Vegas were especially avoided.
So the correlation appears to be a coincidence of geography, rather than a sign of some underlying mechanism.
The mechanism is known (Score:2)
Everything is radioactive... (Score:2)
Everything is radioactive, everything is a chemical
We are surrounded by it, we bathe in it every day, the sun is radioactive, the earth is radioactive, our food is radioactive, drinking water is radioactive, the air is radioactive, mothers milk is radioactive. We are radioactive.
What we should be really concerned about is Dihydromonoxide [wikipedia.org], it is insidious.
Re: Everything is radioactive... (Score:2)
some things are more radioactive than they used to be.
some foods contain added chemicals that they didn't used to have.
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Another country? (Score:2)
Not enough (Score:2)
You have to take a banana (also radioactive) and put your honey on that.
Honey Boom Boom (Score:2)
Just in case anyone wants a mocumentary out of this.
Countries such as Russia, France and the U.S. Tsk! (Score:2)
The total yield of the french nukes was less than a tenth of the U.S. nukes. Glad you at least decided to tack on your own country there at the end of the list. Forget China, France and the UK! This is on the US and USSR. Can we dispense with nations behaving like gorillas, hammering their chests while making monkey noises and throwing leaves and feces into the air? Thank you.
'given two half lives' (Score:2)
Sunshine Units! (Score:2)
I remember when they referred to radiation as "Sunshine Units", like it was harmless and maybe even good for you.
Nearly 2 half-lives (Score:2)
The fact that there's still radiation from Cs after less than two half lives doesn't seem surprising to me, there's still over 25% of it left. When it comes to half-lives and the question of "how much is left from t_0", why would it ever be surprising? Am I missing why that's surprising to the researchers?
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Hot honey (Score:2)
I always thought my honey was hot. Now I know why. But it doesn't explain why my honey thought I was hot, too.
Yes She Is (Score:2)
My American Honey is RADIOACTIVE! Damn straight she is!
USA! USA!
De Goggles... (Score:2)
De Goggles...dey doo Nothing!
Could this explain colony collapse disorder? (Score:2)