Many German wild boars are too radioactive
Although it’s been 28 years since the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, Ukraine, many wild boars in Germany prove to be too radioactive for consumption.
Their meat therefore needs to be destroyed instead of eaten.
This was the outcome of a research amongst 586 wild boars in the German state of Thuringia, in the country’s centre, the newspaper Leipziger Volkszeitung reported recently.
The problem mainly applies to wild boars living in forests. They root into the earth and eat mushroom roots. Radioactive cesium is stored in these, which was blown from Ukraine to the centre of Europe in 1986’s nuclear disaster. This has led to almost 10% of wild boars in Thuringia being too radioactive for consumption. Hunters will get compensated for the meat that is destroyed.
Law stipulates that treshold levels are at 600 becquerel per kg of meat.
The problem will not be solved very shortly, as the cesium isotopes causing the radioactivity has a half-life of 30 years. This means that only after 30 years about 50% of the remaining radioactive cesium will have disappeared as atoms decay.
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