This reminds me of the desirability of pre-WWII battleship steel in particle physics experiments. Due to required detection sensitivity they need to construct experiments from materials that have as low background radiation as possible in order to not mask the actual information of interest. Ever since the first atomic bombs were detonated, sufficiently low-radioactivity steel became much more difficult to find. A large portion of available low-background steel supply is from battleships that were built before the bombs [1]
Note that there is a similar particle-physics demand for lead from Roman-Empire warships ("ancient lead"). But in that case, it doesn't have anything to do with anthropogenic radiation. Rather, lead that is in the ground is constantly kept slightly radioactivate by background decays. But lead that has been pulled out of the ground and allowed to sit unmolested for a thousand years will deactivate.
The presence of Cesium-137 and Strontium-90 has also been used to reveal art forgeries. Before atomic bombs were tested, these isotopes did not exist in nature. Art produced before 1945 will not contain these isotopes, while art produced after that time usually will.
And one source for this steel is courtesy to Admiral von Reuter who managed to scuttle his fleet, guarded by the Brits and interned in the Orkney archipelago, in June 1919. Better to sink that serve the enemy, right?
I couldn't find a straight answer to this the last time I looked, but it sounds to me like this is more of a matter of cost then the actual hard need for pre-WWII steel.
We could mine ore that hasn't been exposed to the atmosphere since then, and use air (either purified or found in some air pockets underground) for the furnace behind an airlock.
This would be much more expensive than just finding some pre-WWII steel, there's a lot of that around, but I don't think it's the case that if we somehow didn't have it we'd be screwed.
Forgive my ignorance as I really don't know anything about this but would it not be possible, when using post WW2 steel, to take before and after readings and diff them?
When they say “bathed in radioactive cloud” they actually mean “wind carried trace amounts of radioactive materials”. Anytime anything “nuclear” is involved, the reporting gets very poetic.
Particularly visible in the graph of radioactivity from various times. Fukushima isn't even a visible blip - it's just that our tools are unbelievably sensitive.
Yeah, I wish they would point out that the pollution from China regularly swamps the radiation detectors in the US that are monitoring Fukushima.
"Bathed in a radioactive cloud" actually holds more for Chinese coal pollution than anything from a nuclear plant with the possible exception of Chernobyl.
Just want to point out that low level radiation is probably good for you. It's cool that they found it, but this is not any kind of health danger.
Low level radiation probably acts as a beneficial stressor, like exercise or fasting [1]. Although this level is so low it probably does nothing at all.
You also probably don't have to worry about the radiation you get from bananas or plane flights. And it's possible those dumb sounding radioactive water spas might have actually been helpful.
Fukushima is aweful for the nearby region and still a cautionary tale. But it didn't poison the whole world.
Here's a very straightforward study, "Evidence That Lifelong Low Dose Rates of Ionizing Radiation Increase Lifespan in Long- and Short-Lived Dogs" [1].
Two studies on beagles:
"One exposed the dogs to whole-body cobalt-60 γ-radiation."
"The other evaluated dogs whose lungs were exposed to α-particle radiation from plutonium."
For both studies, excess radiation improved their lifespans by 20-50 percent. It is a substantial beneficial effect. Above a beneficial level of radiation their lifespans shortened to the level of dogs who were not exposed at all and then to substantial reductions in lifespans.
>Fukushima is aweful for the nearby region and still a cautionary tale. But it didn't poison the whole world.
I would be careful with that last statement because seafood from Japan is global.
Only time will tell the true impact of Fukushima's radioactive water.
"More than 1 million tons of radiation-laced water is already being kept on-site in an ever-expanding forest of hundreds of hulking steel tanks—and so far, there’s no plan to deal with them."[1]
12 US gallons = 100 lbs and 1 million tons is equal to 2.4 million gallons
I agree that the level found in the wine is inconsequential, but it's worth pointing out that studies of radiation workers have found that the linear no threshold model does a pretty reasonable job of explaining non-leukemia cancer risk, at least around the levels of radiation equivalent to, say, a multi-decade career as a flight attendant. Granted, the error bars are pretty big, and you have to get to levels equivalent to a trip to Mars for it to get appreciably above background.
TLDR: It's overenthusiastic to think the literature has concluded that low-level radiation is probably good for you, but good experiments are hard.
"Low level radiation probably acts as a beneficial stressor, like exercise or fasting ..."
I have proposed that the common flu that we all get every 12-18 months serves the same purpose and that attempts to avoid this (via the influenza vaccine) could have unintended consequences for the long term health of our immune system ... but I have never been met with anything but incredulity ...
For some context a Becquerel (Bq) is a single decay per second (note the graph shows mBq/l). One gram has an activity of ~3 TBq.
Though 137-Cs has a half-life of ~30yrs it has a biological half-life of ~70 days. (30 if you are treated with Prussian Blue). It fairly uniformly distributes through the body, though it has higher concentrations in soft tissues, which does pose greater damage (see Sievert).
That being said, these are such low quantities you'd die of alcohol many times over before increasing your chance of cancer by 1% over the course of your lifetime.
From Wiki they gave some dogs a dose of 140 MBq/kg and they all died in 33 days. When they gave some other dogs half (70MBq/kg) dosage all the dogs survived.
Very interesting read. I did a double take that a lack of Cesium-137 meant "post-1980" (not "pre-1980") since the levels have dropped off since the testing in the 50s and 60s.
Even more interesting than other sources is the fact that many spinal and similar surgeons reach their lifetime radiation exposure limit in just 10 years of practice. Many (most?) end up with cataracts or other tell tale symptoms of radiation exposure. It's because of all the x-rays needed for minimally invasive surgury.
A similar example of how sensitive measurement tools are: wine from the Livermore area is slightly higher in tritium than wine from elsewhere in California, ostensibly because of proximity to LLNL.
If it was made from grain harvested in the year or so after Fukushima, of course. Literally every plant grown downstream of the plume (it's not clear if North America is the only such region, just the first one across the ocean -- it's possible this is a global thing) is going to show the signature.
People are misunderstanding this. The point here isn't to point out a specific toxin in wine, it was to point out the pervasive reach of this isotope and its utility as a dating mechanism for long-stored agricultural products like wine.
Whiskey is aged in barrels using white oak from North America. The mash is made of grains like corn, barley, rye, etc. I'm guessing the grains came from areas upwind of the plume. Everything pretty much blew out onto the Pacific.
> The team began their study with the conventional measurement of cesium-137 levels in the unopened bottles. That showed levels to be indistinguishable from background noise.
And yet I bet wine snobs are gonna pretend their palates are so refined they can taste it now.
This wouldn't surprise me even a little. I was living in Anaheim at the time of the disaster, and background radiation levels were elevated for so long that I got bored of checking. A normal reading might have been 0.08 - 0.15mSv, and it was super common to see readings in the 0.40-0.50mSv range for months at a time.
After the disaster my professor measured increases in radioactivity to try and determine if there was any increase in background radiation from man made sources. Unfortunately even our liquid nitrogen cooled gallium detector couldn't find anything. I think you need a mass spectrometer to really detect any change in California. (Fukushima itself is a different matter!)
Variation in radiation levels of the magnitude you are showing can be caused by many different sources, most of which are natural. Sun spots, changes in the upper atmosphere, cat sleeping on the detector, etc...
EditNote: We definitely could still detect the consequences of Chernobyl and atmospheric weapons testing. Fukushima didn't come close to touching the contamination from THAT
If I'm reading it correctly, they can date wines based on the amount of radiation given off by them, and line it up with a chart for amount of radiation the atmosphere took in during events.
How could you properly date a bottle if it was in Fukushima during the event, vs a 1960's bottle during the Cuban Missile Crisis?
> the levels of cesium-137 are barely detectable, and even then, only if the wine is destroyed.
[+] [-] rwcarlsen|7 years ago|reply
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel
[+] [-] jessriedel|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alephnil|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TomK32|7 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scuttling_of_the_German_fleet_...
[+] [-] avar|7 years ago|reply
We could mine ore that hasn't been exposed to the atmosphere since then, and use air (either purified or found in some air pockets underground) for the furnace behind an airlock.
This would be much more expensive than just finding some pre-WWII steel, there's a lot of that around, but I don't think it's the case that if we somehow didn't have it we'd be screwed.
Am I wrong?
[+] [-] kilovoltaire|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikec3010|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rorykoehler|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lxe|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gdubs|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Groxx|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bsder|7 years ago|reply
"Bathed in a radioactive cloud" actually holds more for Chinese coal pollution than anything from a nuclear plant with the possible exception of Chernobyl.
[+] [-] fred_is_fred|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joshe|7 years ago|reply
Low level radiation probably acts as a beneficial stressor, like exercise or fasting [1]. Although this level is so low it probably does nothing at all.
You also probably don't have to worry about the radiation you get from bananas or plane flights. And it's possible those dumb sounding radioactive water spas might have actually been helpful.
Fukushima is aweful for the nearby region and still a cautionary tale. But it didn't poison the whole world.
[1] http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2015/04/06/small-radi...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2477717/
http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2016/ph241/yang1/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26808887
[+] [-] joshe|7 years ago|reply
Two studies on beagles:
"One exposed the dogs to whole-body cobalt-60 γ-radiation."
"The other evaluated dogs whose lungs were exposed to α-particle radiation from plutonium."
For both studies, excess radiation improved their lifespans by 20-50 percent. It is a substantial beneficial effect. Above a beneficial level of radiation their lifespans shortened to the level of dogs who were not exposed at all and then to substantial reductions in lifespans.
This graph illustrates it best: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5347275/figure/...
We don't know why low radiation exposure is good, but it does seem to be.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5347275/
[+] [-] justatdotin|7 years ago|reply
colour me unconvinced.
sure, hormesis is a theory worth considering, but so is Petkau. There are good reasons that international standards retain LNT on review.
[+] [-] bob_theslob646|7 years ago|reply
I would be careful with that last statement because seafood from Japan is global.
Only time will tell the true impact of Fukushima's radioactive water.
"More than 1 million tons of radiation-laced water is already being kept on-site in an ever-expanding forest of hundreds of hulking steel tanks—and so far, there’s no plan to deal with them."[1]
12 US gallons = 100 lbs and 1 million tons is equal to 2.4 million gallons
https://www.wired.com/story/fukushimas-other-big-problem-a-m...
[+] [-] w00kie|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kevin_thibedeau|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rflrob|7 years ago|reply
TLDR: It's overenthusiastic to think the literature has concluded that low-level radiation is probably good for you, but good experiments are hard.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2634664/
Dose examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sievert#Dose_examples
[+] [-] rsync|7 years ago|reply
I have proposed that the common flu that we all get every 12-18 months serves the same purpose and that attempts to avoid this (via the influenza vaccine) could have unintended consequences for the long term health of our immune system ... but I have never been met with anything but incredulity ...
[+] [-] godelski|7 years ago|reply
Though 137-Cs has a half-life of ~30yrs it has a biological half-life of ~70 days. (30 if you are treated with Prussian Blue). It fairly uniformly distributes through the body, though it has higher concentrations in soft tissues, which does pose greater damage (see Sievert).
That being said, these are such low quantities you'd die of alcohol many times over before increasing your chance of cancer by 1% over the course of your lifetime.
From Wiki they gave some dogs a dose of 140 MBq/kg and they all died in 33 days. When they gave some other dogs half (70MBq/kg) dosage all the dogs survived.
[+] [-] 1_800_UNICORN|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] new_age_garbage|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iancmceachern|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lysium|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jcl|7 years ago|reply
https://books.google.com/books?id=nAgxAQAAMAAJ&pg=RA2-PA63&l...
[+] [-] candiodari|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] novia|7 years ago|reply
I'd delete this comment if it were possible.
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] bdz|7 years ago|reply
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/alcohol-radioactive/
[+] [-] JoeAltmaier|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] devy|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ajross|7 years ago|reply
People are misunderstanding this. The point here isn't to point out a specific toxin in wine, it was to point out the pervasive reach of this isotope and its utility as a dating mechanism for long-stored agricultural products like wine.
[+] [-] westbywest|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iask|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tabtab|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tzahola|7 years ago|reply
Just kidding. A regular banana is probably an order of manitude more radioactive than these wines.
[+] [-] testaccount7|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] calimac|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] java_script|7 years ago|reply
And yet I bet wine snobs are gonna pretend their palates are so refined they can taste it now.
[+] [-] oceanghost|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] foxyv|7 years ago|reply
Variation in radiation levels of the magnitude you are showing can be caused by many different sources, most of which are natural. Sun spots, changes in the upper atmosphere, cat sleeping on the detector, etc...
EditNote: We definitely could still detect the consequences of Chernobyl and atmospheric weapons testing. Fukushima didn't come close to touching the contamination from THAT
[+] [-] TimTheTinker|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] branko_d|7 years ago|reply
https://youtu.be/1N1ydPJGGj4
[+] [-] function_seven|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cremp|7 years ago|reply
How could you properly date a bottle if it was in Fukushima during the event, vs a 1960's bottle during the Cuban Missile Crisis?
> the levels of cesium-137 are barely detectable, and even then, only if the wine is destroyed.
So nothing to see here, move along.