Thousands evacuate as Fukishima nuclear emergency is declared

[Peter Lemkin]

Whatever radioactive daughters are in the environment, will be bioaccumulated in the ecosystem - along with direct irradiation of all living creatures by the radioactive elements - some of which have half-lives measured in the tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of years.

Wild boars roam Czech forests - and some of them are radioactive

The Czech Republic has an unusual problem this winter with its wild boar meat, a local delicacy. The boars are radioactive.
Actually, it's not the boars themselves per se, but what they're eating. A cold and snowy winter is forcing them to feed on false truffles, an underground mushroom common in the Sumava mountain region shared by Czechs, Austrians, Germans - and wild boars.
The mushrooms can absorb high levels of the radioactive isotope Caesium 137. And three decades ago the nuclear catastrophe at Chernobyl released a fair amount of Caesium 137 that eventually drifted down on the Sumava mountains.
Now the boars are eating the mushrooms, and ingesting the Caesium 137 along with them. That's making their meat radioactive, Jiri Drapal at the State Veterinary Administration told Reuters.
"It is more or less a time issue," Drapal said.
But it's a long time period. The half life of Caesium 137 is 30 years - that is, it takes 30 years for the radioactivity of the isotope to fall to half its original value. Then another 30 to fall to half again, and so on. The boars could be glowing for quite a while.
"We can expect to find (affected) food for a number of years from now," Drapal said.
And that could cause some problems with the supply of boar meat, which is popular in the Czech Republic. It often shows up on restaurant menus in goulash, a thick stew of meat, sauce and dumplings.