I Is Consuming Wild Boar in Sweden Risky Due to High Radioactivity Levels?

[Sherwood Botsford]

Recent news story about wild boar in Sweden running about 18,000 bec/kg. I was trying to put this in perspective as to what the risk was for untamed porkchops.

This is a non trivial conversion. Please feel free to correct me:

The primary radiation source is Cesium 137 -- it's a gamma emitter, with a peak around 700 kev.

Radiation exposure in terms of effect is measured in Joules/kg.

1 J = 6.2 E+18 ev. = 6.2 E+15 kev

1 kg of pig = 18,000 emissions/second * 700 kev/event = 2 E-10 Watts.

About 30 million seconds in a year, so about .01 J per kg pig emitted in a year.

Cesium has a residence time in the body of 50 to 100 days. Call it .25 year.

So a 60 kg person eating a kg of pig will get 1/4 year * .01 J = 2.5 mSv or .25 rem.

A person gets about 1/3 of a rem per year So this kg of pig is ballpark a year's normal radiation dose.

Am I correct?

Is my methodology correct?

Note to moderators: This may be more appropriate to the biology subforum. Feel free to move it.

 

[DrDu]

No, that's too much. The point is that only a fraction of the cesium ingested will really be absorbed. As a rule of thumb 60.000 Bq of Cs-137 correspond to 1 mSv on ingestion.
Btw., the high activities found in boar is due to the diet of the boars, namely hypogaeic mushrooms of the genus Elaphomyces.

 

[mfb]

I addition to the fraction of cesium that is not absorbed: You divided the energy by 1 kg, basically assuming the whole body mass is replaced by the meat. Divide it by a more typical body mass of 80 kg (or 60 kg) and the dose goes down a lot. Some of the radiation will also leave the body, reducing the dose even further.

 

[f95toli]

When I was an undergraduate (in Sweden) I took a short course in radiation safety (this must have been in 1998). The lecturer was a radiochemist who was also the radiation safety officer for the physics department.
When teaching us how to calculate the absorbed dose he mentioned that he once or twice a year would -illegally- buy moose meat which should have been destroyed (or rather buried) because of the Cs level being too high (>1500 bec/kg) directly from the hunters (at least back then all moose meat had to be tested before you could eat it).
He would then check the level himself and calculate how much he could safely eat
That way he was able to buy some very nice meat very cheaply

He was quite an interesting guy