They were it was just handled by the Finns prior. The weather station is just changing hands which likely happens on a semi regular basis so this isn’t a new development.
Wild mushroom in some parts of Germany are still radioactive to this day exactly because of this. After Chernobyl, clouds with radioactive particles moved west and then started raining over Germany. Certain species of mushroom tend to accumulate the Caesium-137 from that and these mushroom then get eaten by wild animals. To this day if you sell wild animals that were shot in these areas you have to get them tested. They regularly exceed legal contamination levels deemed safe for human consumption.
> In the last years values of up to several thousand becquerel per kilogram were measured in wild game and certain edible mushrooms. In Germany it is not permitted to market food with more than 600 becquerel caesium-137 per kilogram. [1]
And I vaguely remember an eminent Norwegian professor in the field of radiation said he would buy an extra freezer so he could buy up cheap reindeer meat. The slaughtering was probably unnecessary.
I suspect it’s a matter too of where the radiation accumulates. Looking up the products from Chernobyl:
The body mistakes cesium for potassium, this one I already knew from documentaries about Bikini. Half life of 30 years, but it surprisingly doesn’t bioaccumulate (biological half life of 70 days is not great but isn’t a death sentence). But it does accumulate in soft tissue, so you’re gonna eat it.
Radioactive iodine is a bit scary, but what came from Chernobyl has a half life of 8 days, so I could see how a freezer would be very useful there.
Strontium-90 is the scary one. That is mistaken for calcium. And has an average biological half life of 18 years, but that depends very much on where it got absorbed. Anywhere from 14 days to 49 years. And a 29 year half life, similar to cesium-137. Muscles need calcium to function, but most of it is stored in the bones, so maybe this is what the scientist meant?
Grass contains both calcium and potassium, though the thing about Scandinavian reindeer is that they eat a lot of lichen in the winter. It’s why they are so historically important to the traditional diet. But then Chernobyl happened in the Spring, so the reindeer would be accumulators.
It still happens, actually. Only a few years ago it was extra wet and warm at some mountain passes here, so it grew more mushrooms than normal, and that mushroom absorbs cesium-137 from the ground, which then ends up in the reindeer in bigger concentrations. Just checked, and it went from 201 becquerel per kg meat to 1301 the next year. In 2019, more than 30 years later.
Still below limits for what can be sold and eaten here (3000), but shows how big the fallout was that it still shows up decades later.
It's not easy being a reindeer, the populace where I live recently had to be killed and burned due to a prion disease.
The title of this is misleading. The article says the only thing that's changing is ownership.
Kinda surprised they haven't been doing this since the 60's... What with the cold war being a thing...
They were it was just handled by the Finns prior. The weather station is just changing hands which likely happens on a semi regular basis so this isn’t a new development.
I vaguely remember like a decade ago, maybe two, they had to slaughter a ton of wild reindeer that had become radioactive
Turned out they had been eating grass that had become radioactive somehow from drifting fallout from Chernobyl?
Once the radioactivity gets into the dirt it just sits there for years and years
Wild mushroom in some parts of Germany are still radioactive to this day exactly because of this. After Chernobyl, clouds with radioactive particles moved west and then started raining over Germany. Certain species of mushroom tend to accumulate the Caesium-137 from that and these mushroom then get eaten by wild animals. To this day if you sell wild animals that were shot in these areas you have to get them tested. They regularly exceed legal contamination levels deemed safe for human consumption.
> In the last years values of up to several thousand becquerel per kilogram were measured in wild game and certain edible mushrooms. In Germany it is not permitted to market food with more than 600 becquerel caesium-137 per kilogram. [1]
[1] https://www.bfs.de/EN/topics/ion/environment/foodstuffs/mush...
And I vaguely remember an eminent Norwegian professor in the field of radiation said he would buy an extra freezer so he could buy up cheap reindeer meat. The slaughtering was probably unnecessary.
I suspect it’s a matter too of where the radiation accumulates. Looking up the products from Chernobyl:
The body mistakes cesium for potassium, this one I already knew from documentaries about Bikini. Half life of 30 years, but it surprisingly doesn’t bioaccumulate (biological half life of 70 days is not great but isn’t a death sentence). But it does accumulate in soft tissue, so you’re gonna eat it.
Radioactive iodine is a bit scary, but what came from Chernobyl has a half life of 8 days, so I could see how a freezer would be very useful there.
Strontium-90 is the scary one. That is mistaken for calcium. And has an average biological half life of 18 years, but that depends very much on where it got absorbed. Anywhere from 14 days to 49 years. And a 29 year half life, similar to cesium-137. Muscles need calcium to function, but most of it is stored in the bones, so maybe this is what the scientist meant?
Grass contains both calcium and potassium, though the thing about Scandinavian reindeer is that they eat a lot of lichen in the winter. It’s why they are so historically important to the traditional diet. But then Chernobyl happened in the Spring, so the reindeer would be accumulators.
It still happens, actually. Only a few years ago it was extra wet and warm at some mountain passes here, so it grew more mushrooms than normal, and that mushroom absorbs cesium-137 from the ground, which then ends up in the reindeer in bigger concentrations. Just checked, and it went from 201 becquerel per kg meat to 1301 the next year. In 2019, more than 30 years later.
Still below limits for what can be sold and eaten here (3000), but shows how big the fallout was that it still shows up decades later.
It's not easy being a reindeer, the populace where I live recently had to be killed and burned due to a prion disease.