US Grass Fed Beef Nuclear Contamination

The speaker says that in the 2011 data the energies below 40keV were cut off for an unknown reason. This is actually very common. Depending on the detector you use and its condition at the time of its operation, the detectors ability to detect low energy gamma and x-rays are not always consistent. It is not uncommon for a detector to be very noisy at low energy and thus give you unusable data. This doesn’t mean that you are losing information on Cesium. Cs-134 does have x-rays below 40keV but they are given off so infrequently compared to its 605keV gamma that it is much better to use the gamma signature to tell how much Cs-134 you have in your sample. Cs-137 is similar in that respect. The gamma signature is much easier to use in identifying the Cesium level and you can use an isotope branching table to tell you how many x-rays were emitted. No information is lost.

The speaker claims that the decrease in K-40 may be the consequence of Cesium replacement. Although he is correct that Cesium could be a replacement for Potassium in the body, there is no preference for any particular isotope of Potassium. This means that Cesium would replace stable Potassium just as readily as radioactive Potassium. Since K-40 only makes up 0.01% of all Potassium, the level of Cesium in the beef would have to have increased substantially to create such a deficit. A much more likely explanation is that he is simply measuring a seasonal difference in Potassium levels. It is also unclear how he ran his tests; he did not include error bars in his data points and therefore it is unclear that the difference that he reports is even statistically significant.

The speaker mentions that we see an increase in the Radon daughters post Fukushima. The most prominent increase he shows is with Lead-212. This is not a Radon daughter; it is part of the Thorium series which is commonly found in natural background.

He then shows another table of isotopes that he is more confident in. This graph is quite problematic. The speaker claims that Ce-143 was present in the 2011 and 2012 samples. A major flaw in his assessment is that the 140keV line that was “detected” is not one of the prominent Ce-143 lines. If it were correctly identified then you would expect to see a cerium peak at 293keV and it would be over 100 times larger. There is a similar error in the identification of Cs-134, U-235, Th-234, Co-60 and I am sure other that I have not checked. It seems to me that all of this data falls within the noise of the detection system that he was using.

-Victor