Somewhere in Austria, winemakers are wondering how the American's can get away with putting radiation in their wine but they put anti-freeze in their bottles and everyone lost their minds.
Fukushima reactors lend exotic nuclear finish to California's wines
Savants reckon radiation released by the 2011 Fukushima nuclear kerfuffle has made its way into California's wine. A paper emitted this month by researchers at the University of Bordeaux Centre d'Études Nucléaires de Bordeaux-Gradignan (CNRS) in France revealed that levels of cesium-137 in the atmosphere rose as a result of …
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Thursday 19th July 2018 21:22 GMT jake
Worse than anti-freeze!
There are detectable levels of Di-Hydrogen Monoxide (DHMO) in all California wines! DHMO is a well-known industrial solvent and coolant, and is used in virtually every commercial food growing operation in California! This chemical is adsorbed into all foods during production, and even after a thorough cleaning it is still present! Worse, it is present in all California produced foods, even if they are gluten free, dairy free, non-GMO, unfiltered and organically grown with no tree or ground nuts!
Ban all food produced in California! Write to your Congressman demanding the banning of DHMO, before it becomes so common you drown in it!
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Friday 20th July 2018 08:23 GMT DMcFarland08
Because the levels of radiation are less than what you'd find in just about... anything around you. We're talking mBq per liter.
If you eat a single banana, you'd get more radiation exposure than if you chugged enough of this wine to give you alcohol poisoning.
Also, please, keep in mind that Radiation and Radioactive Particulate are different things. You can't really "put radiation" in anything, any more than you can "put light" in anything - most radiation we interact with *is* light, after all, and little of it lasts more than a few milliseconds.
Radioactive particulate is a different matter; it emits radiation.
Still, we are talking mBq/Liter. You might as well measure a beach by milli-granules-of-sand. Becquerels are not often used in professional communities regarding radiation because you wind up with measures on the orders of "Hundreds of Thousands of Becquerels" without it meaning * a dang thing *.
More common is the Curie.
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Friday 20th July 2018 11:38 GMT Michael Strorm
> If you eat a single banana, you'd get more radiation exposure
It's true that the level of radiation being discussed in this story is tiny, and nothing to worry about.
That said, since we're discussing the banana equivalent dose, I'd point out that it's misleading. It rests upon the fact that bananas contain potassium, of which a very small percentage (in nature) is the radioactive isotope potassium-40.
However, your body doesn't retain potassium much beyond the amount it needs; anything in excess will be secreted via the usual channels. (#) Thus, unless you were deficient to begin with, eating a banana isn't going to noticeably increase the amount of potassium- and hence radioactive potassium-40- in your body, which will remain fairly constant. (Hence, in turn, the (incredibly low) level of radiation that it exposes you to should also remain constant.)
In short, the radioactive potassium from bananas doesn't "build up" inside your body if you eat more of them, in contrast to other radioactive substances that can accumulate in your bones et al.
(#) It doesn't really matter whether the potassium it got rid of is the existing or "new" stuff, as it has a half-life of just over a billion years.
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Thursday 19th July 2018 20:26 GMT Voland's right hand
Grapes do not absorb much
The interesting tests are cucumber peel and mushrooms.
My family has a couple of friends who pinched a Geiger counter post Chernobyl and measured everything they could get their hands on (which was going to end up on the table).
There were only two things which drove it off the scale. Cucumbers (specifically the peel) and forest mushrooms.
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Friday 20th July 2018 05:14 GMT Voland's right hand
Re: Grapes do not absorb much
Just cucumbers? Not melons, squash or gourds?
Cucumber peel specifically. Cucumber collects all sh*t from where it grows and deposits it in the peel. This was in the days when lead fuel was still in wide use so a couple of years later I decided to run some spectrometer tests on the peel. The results were let's say not pretty. I have been peeling cucumbers ever since (the core has little or no contamination).
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Saturday 21st July 2018 01:11 GMT Tannin
Re: Grapes do not absorb much
"Cucumber peel specifically. Cucumber collects all sh*t from where it grows and deposits it in the peel. This was in the days when lead fuel was still in wide use so a couple of years later I decided to run some spectrometer tests on the peel. The results were let's say not pretty. I have been peeling cucumbers ever since (the core has little or no contamination)."
The peel also collects all (or nearly all) the useful nutrients. You know, the stuff that keeps you alive. The inside of the cucumber is mostly water. So, essentially, you have a choice.
* You can eat the whole thing, in which case you die slowly of radiation poisoning.
* Or you can peel it, in which case you die slowly of malnutrition.
(Unless, of course, the di-hydrogen monoxide gets you first.)
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Friday 20th July 2018 07:44 GMT bpfh
Re: Grapes do not absorb much
Interesting that rosé has less Cs than reds and supports your cucumber peel reading: rosé wines are either pressed or more often “bled” off, so the actual fermenting juice is separated from the grape skin, so it would seem that it’s concentrated in the skin, and not just on it or in the yeast used for the wine ( the white powder on a grape skin is actually yeast and can be used to ferment the grapes naturally, though it can be filtered out in “post processing”.
As for mushrooms, in Germany if you hunt boar, you have to do a radiation test on them as some of them are not clean for human consumption due to their personal consumption of forest mushrooms and sometimes have to be disposed of as low level radioactive waste, and there have been some studies about using fungi in radiation cleanup as they do clean some radioactive elements from the earth where they grow, following some studies in Chernobyl where fungi growing in the plant were much more radioactive than the supports they were growing on - and explains the glow in the dark wild piggies who love shrooms...
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Friday 20th July 2018 12:37 GMT CrazyOldCatMan
Re: Radioactivity, wild boars
magic potion in that indomitable Gaulish village? (besides tea leaves, canonically established
No no no - tea was for fobbing of those Eenglish with fake magic potion on the basis that they wouldn't know othewise.
Slightly ironic given what later happened to Napoleon[1]..
[1] Yes yes, I know that he was beaten by a coalition at Waterloo (British, some Germans and various Prussians). But the Peninsula War was mostly British with bit-parts by the Portugese and Spanish.
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Friday 20th July 2018 11:49 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Grapes do not absorb much
> Forest mushrooms
Did they get them from the Red Forest by any chance?
(Then again, that's assuming they can grow there at all, given the radiation's adverse effects on bacteria and fungi...)
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Thursday 19th July 2018 21:04 GMT Wellyboot
Re: Banana Equivalent Dose (BED)
A useful site conversion site.
https://www.translatorscafe.com/unit-converter/en/radiation-activity/
It gives 7.5mBq/litre as about 0.45 decays per minute, so if you drink the whole bottle (0.75 litre) you'll have to cross your legs for a long while to reach the 1860 particle decays in 1 BED minute (31 becquerel/gram)
and obligatory XKCD ref.
https://xkcd.com/radiation/
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Saturday 21st July 2018 11:29 GMT Tomato42
Re: Banana Equivalent Dose (BED)
> but I would hope the commenters here understand what a sievert is.
and if the article gave the exposure in µSv (or likely nSv), I wouldn't complain, what it did is give the following:
> cesium-137 activity from about 7.5 mBq per liter to around 15
And Becquerel is about as intuitive as chains to the hogshead for fuel efficiency.
(I'd also hope that commenters here know that all SI units named after people are capitalised, or do you don't know of Rolf Sievert? j/k)
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Friday 20th July 2018 11:21 GMT Rameses Niblick the Third Kerplunk Kerplunk Whoops Where's My Thribble?
Re: Banana Equivalent Dose (BED)
@Jake
At a bottle per day, that's only eleven and a third years. Even if you give it up for Lent, you should be done by April 2032ish.
Hang on a minute...does this mean that we now can work out a formula to convert the BED in to a representative number of liver transplants, such that we could make a statement like "...a dose of radiation like that is equivalent to eating one banana, or to put it another way, a total of 6 months in rehab over a course of 4 visits, as well as 2 liver transplants"?
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Thursday 19th July 2018 21:00 GMT Tomato42
yes, our scientific equipment is amazing...
...it can measure differences in dangerous substances couple of orders of magnitude below their dangerous levels
+1 on the BED above; how many hundreds of litres (litre is 1/159th of a tierce, for the metrically-challenged people) that need to be drunk for 1 BED?
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Thursday 19th July 2018 21:11 GMT jake
" researchers at the University of Bordeaux Centre d'Études Nucléaires de Bordeaux-Gradignan"
Ah, yes. Those wacky French folks ... still trying to find ways to scare people off of California wines after gittin' a severe whuppin' at the Judgement of Paris back in '76 ... Sorry, guys (and gauls), our wine is still world-class, and it's going to stay that way.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have to get to the hospital to have this spare eye growing out of my left ear looked into.
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Friday 20th July 2018 12:13 GMT Alistair
Re: " researchers at the University of Bordeaux Centre d'Études Nucléaires de Bordeaux-Gradignan"
Now if you'll excuse me, I have to get to the hospital to have this spare eye growing out of my left ear looked into
I hope your health benefits package is all paid up this month. That could end up costin ya!
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Friday 20th July 2018 12:40 GMT CrazyOldCatMan
Re: " researchers at the University of Bordeaux Centre d'Études Nucléaires de Bordeaux-Gradignan"
our wine is still world-class, and it's going to stay that way.
And, even more amusingly, at a blind tasting of sparkling white wines recently, a French judge scored an English wine more highly than Champagne.
Said English wine went on to claim the top prize.
Rumours that he had to flee into exile are, I'm sure, exaggerated.
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Friday 20th July 2018 14:23 GMT defiler
Re: " researchers at the University of Bordeaux Centre d'Études Nucléaires de Bordeaux-Gradignan"
Sorry, guys (and gauls), our wine is still world-class, and it's going to stay that way.
It did amuse me that the French were having a pop at Californian wines. Some of them are really nice, some of them are garbage. But then, it's the same in France. Give me Spanish reds any day.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
