Chernobyl disaster radioactivity in Swedish wild boars

This video from the USA says about itself:

14 March 2017

In the aftermath of the Fukushima disaster, boars populations have skyrocketed. Cenk Uygur, John Iadarola, and Jordan Chariton, the hosts of The Young Turks, give you updates on the Fukushima disaster.

“Six years after an earthquake and tsunami led to three nuclear reactors melting down, Japan is still generating and struggling with staggering amounts of radioactive waste.

In November, the Japanese government said cleanup and compensation costs for the March 2011 Fukushima Dai-ichi disaster would be an unprecedented 20 trillion yen ($180 billion) — double the previous estimate. Nuclear safety may not come cheap for an industry that is increasingly noncompetitive nationally and globally, but lack of safety is very costly indeed.

Soaring costs and accumulating waste aren’t Fukushima’s only problems. While the government wants to start lifting evacuation orders on some towns within the 12-mile exclusion zone, potential returnees have to deal with hundreds of radioactive wild boars roaming the streets. Reuters reports that some boars have “levels of radioactive material 130 times above Japan’s safety standards.”

“After people left, their ecosystem changed,” explained one local hunter hired to deal with the boars. “They began coming down from the mountains and now they aren’t going back. They found plenty of food, and no one will come after them. This is their new home now.” More than 13,000 boars have been hunted so far.”

Read more here.

Translated from Dutch daily De Volkskrant:

30 years after the Chernobyl disaster, radioactive wild boar suddenly turn up in Sweden

Swine eat truffles containing radiation from the Chernobyl disaster in 1986

More than thirty years after the nuclear disaster in Chernobyl, radioactive wild boar suddenly show up in Sweden. This is because the Swedish boar now comes to places in nature where they did not dare until recently.

By Eric Van Den Outenaar October 9, 2017, 19:06

Nature areas in the middle and north of Sweden received a big radioactive cloud during the spring of 1986 from Ukraine. As a result, no berries and mushrooms were allowed to be picked for a long time. Most plants and animals have recovered.

For the wild boars, however, things go from bad to worse. …

The highest measured radioactivity in a wild boar so far is 16 thousand becquerel per 1,000 grams of pork, reported the Swedish public broadcaster SVT. At 10 thousand becquerel per 1,000 grams, the Swedish Food and Food Authority considers the eating of wild pork irresponsible.

“More than 30 years after the Chernobyl disaster, people are still routinely exposed to radioactive caesium when consuming locally produced staple foods, including milk, in Chernobyl-affected areas of Ukraine,” said Dr Iryna Labunska, of Greenpeace Research Laboratories at the University of Exeter: here.

Ukrainian capital Kiev engulfed in smog from wildfires near Chernobyl. By Jason Melanovski and Clara Weiss, 18 April 2020.

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