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
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.
> 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...
What amazes me is the mushroom mycelium are actually sorting out the radioactive material grain by grain, which would be highly impractical any other way.
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.
Surprised this station seems to post-date that? Seems like it would have been handy to have in the Cold War. Then again, Russia has long had a mining presence on Svalbard so maybe that has something to do with it.
They did have gamma, neutron, and X-ray detectors too but I’d guess those were also tuned to detect detonations rather than small background changes. That might not be feasible from so high up and it would square with the Velas’ role in discovering gamma-ray bursts.
This triggered an investigation which traced the contamination to the improper disposal of the active element of a retired medical radiotherapy machine that used cobalt-60 - the radioactive cobalt ended up mixed with a large batch of other scrap metal, contaminating (among other things) ~6,600 tons of rebar, much of which had already been shipped at the time this was discovered...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciudad_Ju%C3%A1rez_cobalt-60_c...
Not only a mining presence [1]: "After the war, the Soviet Union proposed common Norwegian and Soviet administration and military defence of Svalbard. This was rejected in 1947 by Norway, which two years later joined NATO. The Soviet Union retained high civilian activity on Svalbard, in part to ensure that the archipelago was not used by NATO."
If you already have the facility why not record everything? Or is a good radiation detector a $$$$ investment?
"""The Finnish Meteorological Institute is to discontinue its air monitoring in Svalbard, and on October 1st, the Norwegian Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority (DSA) will take over ownership of its air sampling equipment."""
https://www.highnorthnews.com/en/signs-russia-gearing-new-nu...
>>This activity is believed to be connected to another test of nuclear-powered cruise missile called the Burevestnik, reports Radio Liberty.
londons_explore•4mo ago
dogma1138•4mo ago
ludicrousdispla•4mo ago
Sweden developed the SAUNA and the US has its ARSA and RASA systems, all of which have been operational since the early 2000s and likely had predecessors before then.