30 August 2023
A team set out to analyze cesium levels using 48 samples of wild boar meat collected by hunters during 2019–2021, from 11 regions of Bavaria.
A high-purity gamma-ray detector was used to measure the activity of cesium-137, and high-tech mass spectrometry compared the amount of cesium-135 to that of cesium-137.
Radioactive cesium levels in 88 percent of the meat samples tested were higher than Germany's legal threshold, sometimes by up to 25-times.
Despite Chernobyl being the main source of cesium in wild boars, about a quarter of the samples showed significant enough contributions from weapons fallout to exceed the regulatory limit without even taking the Chernobyl contribution into account.
Using the ratio of cesium-135 to cesium-137, the researchers determined that 60 year-old nuclear weapons testing was responsible for 12–68 percent of the contamination in those samples that surpassed the safe consumption limit.
Study here :-
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.3c03565
