cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/34796179
More packages of frozen shrimp potentially affected by radioactive contamination have been recalled, federal officials said Thursday.
California-based Southwind Foods recalled frozen shrimp sold under the brands Sand Bar, Arctic Shores, Best Yet, Great American and First Street. The bagged products were distributed between July 17 and Aug. 8 to stores and wholesalers in nine states: Alabama, Arizona, California, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Utah, Virginia, and Washington state.
The products have the potential to be contaminated with Cesium-137, a radioactive isotope that is a byproduct of nuclear reactions.
To quote Ron Burgundy:
Like, there’s a good chance that this leads to us discovering a “secret” nuke test, it would almost be worst case scenario if this “just happened”.
C-137 doesn’t just fucking happen, it and S-90 are fission byproducts.
Either someone tested a nuke in the ocean, or there’s somehow fission happening somewhere in the ocean without human involvement.
The radiation was detected in the shipping container, not the shrimp corpses.
Couldn’t this contamination just be the result of old nuclear tests or accidents rather than something recent? Fukushima dumped a lot of Cs-137 and other contaminants into the Pacific.
This other article really had me scratching my head, though. Emphasis mine.
The shrimp came out of the water fine, but it was stored someplace where it just picked up 68 becquerels per kilogram of Cs-137? How does that even make sense?
Someone built their Satisfactory nuclear enrichment center too close to the local Bubba Gump’s.
I can’t justify nuclear. I want to, but it’s such a daunting setup and rocket fuel works well enough.
I’m still working out heat sinks and haven’t even gotten into nitrogen besides parking a fused assembler next to one spot. This game gets wild, fast.
I’m building my first circular factory. I think I hate it, but it looks really neat
I don’t know about you, but I am certainly not cleaning my shelves well enough to avoid Cs-137 contaminating my shrimp…
*looks around at dusty shelves*
You may have a point.
Yous askin too many questions, bub. Keep askin and ya may just find out.
Atlantis is joining World War III
The way shit is going if an ancient nuclear capable country of mermaids just showed up and took over…
Probably wouldn’t be the worst thing
I, for one, would welcome our new mermaid overlords.
Cs-137 is used in industrial density gauges. You want to measure the density of a liquid in a pipe? A radioactive source on one side, a detector on the other, easy-peasy.
Now how the fuck a controlled substance escapes from its highly encapsulated and supposedly-well-tested-and-regularly-inspected compartment and gets into your food, well that’s something else to ponder.
Not in the shrimp, it was detected in the shipping container.
That’s better, but it’s still a mystery. Cs-137 sources should be rigorously stored, even in density gauges they are permanently inside a capsule with a shutter that turns the beam “on and off”. It’s not like you have a chunk of Cs-137 rattling around in a drawer somewhere (or worse, somehow in powered form that gets all over the inside of a shipping container) but that sounds like that’s been the case here.
It’s not the first time one of these sources has come loose though - there was a capsule lost on 1400km of highway in Western Australia a little while ago.