Skip to content

Well, there’s safe and then there’s safe

Not that I’d recommend eating these piggies but:

A genetic study found that wild boar cross-bred with domestic pigs escaped from local farms in areas deserted by humans after a tsunami and an earthquake triggered the 2011 crisis at Fukushima nuclear power plant and displaced 160,000 people.

For years, hunters have been tracking down radioactive boar, which number in their hundreds and registered levels of the radioactive element caesium-137 300 times higher than is safe.

If the boar are breeding and carrying on happily at 300x “safe” then our definition of safe is pretty restrictive……

11 thoughts on “Well, there’s safe and then there’s safe”

  1. The area around Chernobyl has gone back to nature too. Wildlife is thriving there I believe.

  2. Give it a few more years and these pigs’ descendants will be flying around wearing capes and saving the world from grandiose psychotics.

  3. Glow-in-the-dark bacon sounds like a winning product to me.

    Better then the bowls of deceitful green shite served up by media liars.

    We are in a race now to make the AFC’s aware of how the Bogus Blojob’s Marxist ordered greenfreak antics will flop them lower than whaleshit.

    They have been trying to brainwash kids for 50 years but haven’t done well because the main product of dumbing down is short sighted indifference to everything and by their habit of wrong and dickhead prediction about no more snow and the Maldives drowning.

  4. Hmmm.. Depends on the actual barium buildup in them.
    C(a)esium is Mostly Harmless™ , really. It’s the barium decay product that’s actually poisonous and does a gamma flash before going stable that’s a bit of a bother. Then again, the barium doesn’t build up and flushes out as any other salt.

    Wouldn’t want to make it a daily meal, but Fukushima Special Ham sounds like it’s worth a try.. 🙂

  5. Bloke in North Korea (Germany province)

    Your threshold for safe is there because you expect to live longer than a wild boar and to do so without mutating your spermato/oo/cytes more than usual, not because that higher level would be completely incompatible with life, reproduction, or even thriving following removal of your biggest predator.

  6. Cs 137 is used in chemotherapy so it’s not all bad. A half life of 30 years means you need quite a lot of it to get much of the beta radiation that is really nasty.
    Also it’ll normally be flushed out with urine over time.

    I would expect a radioactive porker to survive, unless it is continuously replenishing the Cs in its diet, which is probable.

    The problem of glow in the dark bacon is that each rasher adds a bit more Cs. Poisons tend to concentrate as they go up the food chain. Irradiating yourself from the inside is not a good idea.

  7. Why are hunters looking for boar? They can’t be killing them for meat. And if it’s to protect the environment, then the best thing is leave the boar alone and let nature take its course.

  8. Sadbutmadlad

    Why not ? Boar meat is jolly tasty. Pity we dont get it in Britain, used to buy it in Austria in the winter from the supermarket.

  9. Yet again, massive costs and property losses caused by adherrence to a fake religion.
    In this case, zero threshold linear exposure (or summat like that…haven’t checked).

    But it’s one of the Green Tenets: all radiation is dangerous, there is no lower limit.
    That’s why Cornwall and Edinburgh are uninhabitable, and why anyone crossing the Atlantic in a jet airline immediately grows two heads.

    There’s very strong evidence that not only is there a limit below which radiation is harmless, like most environmental hazards we have evolved to deal with them, it seems that low levels are positively beneficial.

    But that damages the “No nukes!” cry from the usuals, so will never be allowed. It’s totally bananas 🙂

  10. While it is quite possible that the levels described as safe are very conservative, the boar don’t tell us much. If radiation was at a level such that 50% of people would die of cancer by the age of 40, we would consider that to be disastrous, but from the point of view of nature it could be perfectly acceptable – it’s after most people have had children, so an observer might see little effect. Note also that in wild animals illness can easily lead to falling victim to predators ir inability to get food, so the population may appear much healthier than they really are.

    A balanced view can be found at https://xkcd.com/radiation/ It says the dose near Chernobyl “varies wildly”. At the one spot where it’s 6mSv, that means that in 17 hours you’d exceed the 100mSv “Lowest one-year dose clearly linked to increased cancer risk”.

  11. Why not ? Boar meat is jolly tasty. Pity we don’t get it in Britain, used to buy it in Austria in the winter from the supermarket.

    My local butcher stocks it (in the form of sausages). Boar is farmed in the UK, as are crosses with domestic pigs, so-called ‘iron age pigs’.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *