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Fukushima’s nuclear signature found in California wine
- cremp 8y agoIf 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. So nothing to see here, move along.
- 24gttghh 8y agoThe article seems less about the toxicity of the cesium levels, and more about their use as a signature in dating the wine, which I find is still interesting.
- GW150914 8y agoThe article seems less about the toxicity of the cesium levels, and more about their use as a signature in dating the wine, which I find is still interesting. And rightly so, by far the most toxic thing in these bottles is alcohol, not vanishingly small traces of cesium.
- ajross 8y agoIf the bottle was sealed, it won't pick up measurable cesium. That arrives via atmospheric transport, being picked up by rain water and eventually grape plants.
- topspin 8y ago> So nothing to see here, move along. The unit of measure in this are mBq/l; millibecquerel per liter. The paper reports 14 mBq/l in CA wine immediately after Fukushima. So the common 750ml bottle of 2011 CA wine will average one cesium-137 decay event every 53.5 seconds.
- tabtab 8y ago"Daahling! This vintage tastes absolutely radiant!"
- devy 8y agoI wonder if Japanese Whiskey would be affected?
- iask 8y agoOh boy! Is that why some in the US are so expensive?
- cevn 8y agoThat's a different problem. Basically the whiskey makers under predicted the demand 12 years ago or so when they were making that batch. Now it's sold out practically everywhere, hard to find even in Japan.
- warmwaffles 8y agoGlad I have a couple bottles stashed in my liquor cabinet.
- nandemo 8y agoAFAIK the main reason is that Japanese whiskeys started getting awards and demand exploded. Even here in Japan they're expensive, to the extent that scotch has a better bang to the buck ratio.
- westbywest 8y agoWhiskey 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.
- ajross 8y agoIf 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.
- 1_800_UNICORN 8y agoVery 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.
- rwcarlsen 8y agoThis 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] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel
- kilovoltaire 8y agoWow, I hadn't realized the effects of the atomic age were that widespread, creepy.
- mikeash 8y agoTake a look at this friendly graph of carbon-14 concentration in the atmosphere since 1955 for just one example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon-14#/media/File%3ARadiocarbon_bomb_spike.svg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon-14#/media/File%3ARadi...
- avian 8y agoJust note that this friendly graph employs the bad practice of not having the vertical axis origin at 0, which visually exaggerates the change.
- pqhwan 8y agoNot necessarily a bad practice. Most of the graphs I've seen use this technique, do so to make the changes in value visible, not to deceive the viewer.
- barrkel 8y agoThat's just it: if the changes are only visible if you chop off the bottom of the graph, the probability they aren't significant increases.
- joshe 8y agoJust 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. [1] http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2015/04/06/small-radiation/ http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2015/04/06/small-radi... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2477717/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2477717/ http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2016/ph241/yang1/ http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2016/ph241/yang1/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26808887 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26808887
- bob_theslob646 8y ago>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 https://www.wired.com/story/fukushimas-other-big-problem-a-million-tons-of-radioactive-water/ https://www.wired.com/story/fukushimas-other-big-problem-a-m...
- greenshackle2 8y agoFor perspective, that's 4 olympic swimming pools worth of water. It's not a small amount but it's not enormous as far as volumes of liquid goes.
- anonymouz 8y agoA typical olympic pool (assumed 50m x 25m x 2m; the depth actually isn't standarized), contains 2500m^3 of water. 1m^3 of water has a mass of 1t (in typical conditions). So 10^6 tons of water corresponds to 400 olympic swimming pools. That's quite a lot of water (still not much compared to the volume of the oceans, of course).
- novia 8y agoEdit: Oh no. Physics For Future Presidents lied to me. See here: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/alcohol-radioactive/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/alcohol-radioactive/ I'd delete this comment if it were possible.
- bdz 8y agoFake news https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/alcohol-radioactive/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/alcohol-radioactive/
- JoeAltmaier 8y agoCheck Snopes.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- oceanghost 8y agoThis 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.
- foxyv 8y agoAfter 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
- oceanghost 8y agoInteresting to know, thank you.
- TimTheTinker 8y agoObligatory xkcd (chart only, not a comic): https://xkcd.com/radiation/ https://xkcd.com/radiation/
- lxe 8y agoWhen 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.
- fred_is_fred 8y agoWait until someone tells the author about the sun. I get bathed in a radioactive death rays most mornings.
- thaumaturgy 8y agoAt the very end of the article: > ...the levels of cesium-137 are barely detectable... You'll get a lot more exposure from a single plane flight!
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- kolpa 8y agoThe sun is radioactive. Sunlight is not radioactive, it's radiation.
- Robotbeat 8y agoSunlight does effectively produce radiation burns in your skin, however. And that definitely causes cancer. If we treated sunlight the way we treat barely detectable nuclear radiation, we’d never go outside and we’d use blackout curtains.
- bsder 8y agoYeah, 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.
- 8y ago
- tzahola 8y agoOh my god! Ban all nuclear reactors ASAP!!! Just kidding. A regular banana is probably an order of manitude more radioactive than these wines.
- foxyv 8y agoGotta love that gamma radiating Potassium. One of our gamma ray experiments in radiation lab was measuring the spectrum of a banana.
- bitL 8y agoI hope you understand different types of radioactivity and what they do to your body once they are incorporated in your tissues long-term. Something like 5,000 inhaled particle causing cancer probability to rise by 1%... Enjoy your banana simplifications!
- tzahola 8y ago5000 particle? LOL! If that was true we would all have cancer: “The average concentration of radon in the atmosphere is about 6×10−18 molar percent, or about 150 atoms in each ml of air.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radon https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radon
- bitL 8y agoEnjoy your ignorance: https://ratical.org/radiation/CNR/CHfIP1975.pdf https://ratical.org/radiation/CNR/CHfIP1975.pdf
- tzahola 8y agoNowhere in this document do they state that inhaling 5000 particles increases lung cancer risk by 1%. I recommend revisiting high school chemistry, especially the topic of molar mass. (Hint: Plutonium is about 250 g/mol. One mol is 6x10^23 particles.)
- testaccount6 8y ago
- testaccount7 8y agoGood reminder of how much we don’t understand about forecasting second and third order effects a la Taleb.
- java_script 8y ago> 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.
- new_age_garbage 8y agoI'm tasting hints of berry, hints of oak, rubber hose, high notes of plutonium...
- godelski 8y agoFor 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.
- calimac 8y agoThis is further confirmation of the spread of the nuclear signatures. Independent journalists were suppressed and threatened by California officials in Watsonville and Monterey when they were reporting highly elevated levels of radiation on the beaches and water there. See youtube.
- iancmceachern 8y agoEven 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.
- lysium 8y agoDo you have a source on that that you can cite? Thanks in advance!
- code_duck 8y agoHere’s a link I found by searching ‘surgeon radiation exposure’: https://spinalnewsinternational.com/reducing-radiation-exposure-during-spine-surgery/ https://spinalnewsinternational.com/reducing-radiation-expos... This one discusses limiting procedures per year. Apparently in one example a surgeon could do 4000+ safely with a lead apron and only 300 without one. https://insights.ovid.com/crossref?an=00007632-201304010-00013 https://insights.ovid.com/crossref?an=00007632-201304010-000... There appears to be plenty more material out there relating to this.
- iancmceachern 8y agoI apologize for not posting it in the first place. Ul Haque M, Shufflebarger HL, O'Brien M, Macagno A. Radiation exposure during pedicle screw placement in adolescent idiopathic scoliosis: is fluoroscopy safe?. Spine 2006;1;31(21):2516-20. I know about it from here: https://www.nuvasive.com/solutions/lessray/ https://www.nuvasive.com/solutions/lessray/
- branko_d 8y agoBTW, alcoholic drinks are requred to be radioactive by US law. https://youtu.be/1N1ydPJGGj4 https://youtu.be/1N1ydPJGGj4
- function_seven 8y agohttps://www.snopes.com/fact-check/alcohol-radioactive/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/alcohol-radioactive/
- candiodari 8y agoWe should treat this as what it is: a humbling reminder of just how big avogadro's number is.
- jcl 8y agoA 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. https://books.google.com/books?id=nAgxAQAAMAAJ&pg=RA2-PA63&lpg=RA2-PA63&source=bl&ots=sy0Cj7lW5m&sig=_m7VUqXXDDmYTdRGV_r4ZJmsWuE&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiBk6eJ167cAhXSGDQIHUpPDBAQ6AEIhAEwCQ#v=onepage https://books.google.com/books?id=nAgxAQAAMAAJ&pg=RA2-PA63&l...