Radioactive wild boars too polluted to eat

By Jim Leffman via SWNS

Radioactive wild boars in Bavaria are too polluted to eat, with some having 25 times the safety levels, a new study has revealed.

It was believed that the Chernobyl nuclear accident was largely responsible but the new study shows it is nuclear tests from 60 to 80 years ago that have kept them contaminated.

The shaggy-haired, tusked pigs roam free in the woods of Germany and Austria but because they root out truffles and other food to eat from polluted soil their levels are still high.

In contrast, other animals affected by Chernobyl have much lower levels than the pigs, whose radioactive caesium levels render their meat unsafe to eat.

Radioactive caesium is a byproduct of nuclear weapons explosions and nuclear energy production.

It poses risks to public health when it enters the environment and Europe got a large dose of radioactive caesium contamination following the Chernobyl power plant accident in 1986, 37 years ago.

Whilst caesium-137 has declined in most game animals since then, the levels of contamination in wild pigs has remained more or less the same.

This has resulted in their meat continuing to exceed regulatory limits for consumption, a drop in hunting and an overpopulation of the animals in Europe.

This led researchers from Technische University in Vienna and Leibniz University in Hannover to investigate why the radioactive levels haven't fallen.

They found that the pigs still had high levels of caesium-135, a much longer-lived form produced during nuclear fission.

The team worked with hunters to collect wild boar meat from across Southern Germany and then measured the caesium-137 levels with a gamma-ray detector.

To determine the origin of the radioactivity, the team compared the amount of caesium-135 to cesium-137 with a sophisticated mass spectrometer.

A high ratio points to nuclear weapons explosions, whereas a low ratio implicates nuclear reactors.

They found that 88 percent of the 48 meat samples exceeded German regulatory limits for radioactive caesium in food, according to the study published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology.

For the samples with elevated levels, the researchers calculated the ratios of caesium-135 to cesium-137, and found that nuclear weapons testing supplied between 10 and 68 per cent of the contamination.

In some samples, the amount of caesium from weapons alone exceeded regulatory limits.

Study author Dr. Georg Steinhauser from Technische University said: "Some of our samples from 2019 to 2021 exceed the regulatory limits by a factor of up to 25.

"The mid-20th century weapons tests were an underappreciated source of radioactive caesium to German soil, which was also unevenly impacted by the Chernobyl accident.

"Contamination from both sources have been taken up by the wild boars’ food, such as underground truffles, contributing to their persistent radioactivity."

"All samples exhibit signatures of mixing of Chernobyl and nuclear
weapons fallout."

"Caesium from weapons fallout significantly contributes to the total level, 10−68 per cent, in those specimens that exceeded the regulatory limit.

"In some cases, weapons-137Cs alone can lead to exceedances of the regulatory limit, especially in samples with a relatively low total 137Cs level.

"Our findings demonstrate that the superposition of older and newer legacies of 137Cs can vastly surpass the impact of any singular yet dominant source and thus
highlight the critical role of historical releases of 137Cs in current environmental pollution challenges.

"Future nuclear accidents or explosions could worsen these animals’ contamination, potentially impacting food safety for decades."

Dr. Bin Feng from Leibniz University added: "With the intensifying war between Ukraine and Russia, much concern has been expressed about the terrible consequences of a nuclear war or a combat-triggered nuclear accident.

"Although the weapons-137Cs has resided in the environment for at least 60 years and its contribution as a pollutant of central Europe has generally been regarded as negligible compared to that of Chernobyl, our work provides the forensic evidence showing that this underestimated 137Cs legacy can accumulate in certain environmental media along with more recent reactor-137Cs releases.

"Both contributors form an intense 137Cs source that exceeds the contribution from any singular, yet dominant source in the area, like Chernobyl in the case of Bavaria.

"This mixed source is the main supplier to wild boars in the winter season and in turn the main reason for the persistent 137Cs contamination in Bavarian wild boars."