Just In: San Francisco Bay Area milk sample has highest amount of Cesium-137 since last June — Almost double EPA’s maximum contaminant level
charts available here:
http://enenews.com/april-milk-sample-highest
Just In: San Francisco Bay Area milk sample has highest amount of Cesium-137 since last June — Almost double EPA’s maximum contaminant level
Published: April 10th, 2012 at 11:59 am ET
By ENENews
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Title: UCB Milk Sampling Results
Source: UCBDepartment of Nuclear Engineering
Date: April 9, 2012
4/9/2012 (5:45pm): Three recent milk test results have been posted on the milk sample page with “best by” dates of 3/12, 4/9, and 4/16. Very low levels of Cs-134 and Cs-137 were detected in the samples — the amounts are so small that it would require drinking over tens of thousands of liters of milk to receive the small dose that one receives from a cross-country airplane flight. These isotopes can still be detected in milk because they have long half-lives (2 years and 30 years, respectively) and therefore trace amounts will remain in the grass and hay that the cows feed on.
Best Buy Date of 04/09/2012:
Cs-134 @ 0.068 Bq/L
Cs-137 @ 0.141 Bq/L
Total Cs = 0.209 Bq/L or 5.67 pCi/L (27.1 picocuries = 1 becquerel)
Best Buy Date of 04/16/2012:
Cs-134 @ 0.073 Bq/L
Cs-137 @ 0.079 Bq/L
Total Cs = 0.152 Bq/L or 4.12 pCi/L
The EPA Maximum Contaminant Level for radioactive cesium in milk is 3 picocuries/L:
“EPA lumps these gamma and beta emitters together under one collective MCL [Maximum Contaminant Level], so if you’re seeing cesium-137 in your milk or water, the MCL is 3.0 picocuries per liter; if you’re seeing iodine-131, the MCL is 3.0; if you’re seeing cesium-137 and iodine-131, the MCL is still 3.0.” -Forbes.com
These are the highest cesium-137 levels detected by UCB since last June (Far right column is Cs-137)
Published: April 10th, 2012 at 11:59 am ET
MCLs are bad science
With due respect to BRAWN, et al, I remember my lessons on radioactive contaminants, contaminations, exposure, etc.
Frankly MCLs are unrealistic. When you consume contaminated foods, there are important factors that MCLs hide. Those factors are the absorption of radioactive particles into the bloodstream and their deposition in storage sites throughout the body. MCLs are based on normal transit times for food, that is how long it takes from the moment you swallow it until you excrete it. Exposures are then calculated on that and that alone! so it appears you have not received a high enough exposure because the length of time and the amount of radiation are combined to give an exposure equivalance that is used to indicate whether you will get sick QUICKLY or not. There are no calculations in existence for long term exposure dosages!
And no consideration is given to your body's having absorbed and possibly deposited Cesium or Iodine or Plutonium somewhere.
MCLs are deliberate 1950's/1960's pseudo science designed to hide the truth about the health dangers of radioactive materials in your foods.
Milk is one one of the most important foods, particularly for children. And therein lies a big problem because radioactive materials have an affinity for binding with the fat molecules in milk and these molecules are readily absorbed. In that way you take on unwanted Cesium, etc and your body stores it in the fat layers for whenever it will be needed!
Cows love to lick the dew off grass in the morning. It is one of the ways they get enough water for their milk production. In this way any fallout that has come down during the night gets into the cow and then into the milk and it is retained due to the high fat content of milk itself. Just by changing from regular to 2% or 1 % will be very beneficial. And powdered milk (yuck) is generally fat free.
Radioactive Dose
MCLs and other limits rely on the concept of radioactive dose from the field of health physics, and the dose concept (and the entire field of health physics) is very well-established and thoroughly researched — it is not "pseudo science."
Sorry to say this, but most of what you said about dose is wrong. Health physicists are very aware of the basic fact that some elements are taken in by the body and can stay for very long periods of time. Calculations of committed dose, as exposures from ingestion and inhalation are called, take into account the sometimes very long lifetime of certain elements in the body, even out to 70 years. Health physicists are also quite aware that elements can concentrate in certain organs and deliver a much greater dose to a certain part of the body — Iodine-131 is a prime example, where dose to the thyroid is well known to be much greater than doses to other parts of the body. Please read our FAQs #12–14 for more information.
As for milk, it is not generally true that "radioactive materials have an affinity for binding with the fat molecules in milk." Different radioactive elements have different chemical properties — for example, cesium has similar chemistry to potassium. We saw fat-free milk have the same levels as whole milk. Also, there was cesium in powdered milk after Chernobyl: Muck, K. "Longterm reduction of caesium concentration in milk after nuclear fallout," Science of the Total Environment, 162, 63–73 (1995)
Mark [BRAWM Team Member]
CORRECT!!
As for milk, it is not generally true that "radioactive materials have an affinity for binding with the fat molecules in milk."
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Mark is correct in pointing out the other poster is just flat out wrong. What a particular atom binds to in the body is determined by its chemistry, and not whether it is radioactive or not. A chemical doesn't behave differently in chemical reactions depending on whether it is radioactive or not.
Isotopes of the same element behave IDENTICALLY when it comes to chemical reactions. However, different isotopes may differ with regard to radioactivity.
Take the 3 isotopes of hydrogen, for example; protium (H-1), deuterium (D-2) and tritium (T-3). They are all forms of hydrogen; so they all behave chemically like hydrogen. For example, you can make water with any of the three: H2O, D2O, or T2O. However, the first two protium and deuterium are stable, and not radioactive. Only the third isotope, tritium, is radioactive.
Therefore, you can't say radioactive materials as a class behave in a prescribed manner, as the poster that Mark is correcting did.
Come on Enenews, get it straight.
Ahh, Enenews, 13 months in and still can't get the MCLs right....
Seriously, this has been beaten to death here. See - http://www.nuc.berkeley.edu/node/5874#comment-22180 - and then look at Mark Bandstra's link to the table of various radionuclides. Cs-134 has an MCL of 80pci/l, Cs-137 of 200pci/l for drinking water via EPA.
Check out the FDA DILs - http://www.fda.gov/downloads/NewsEvents/PublicHealthFocus/UCM251056.pdf
Seriously, I do check enenews, but this far in it is poor form to keep acting like UCB's milk measurements are something that they are not. I do not think that they could be ignorant of the EPA/FDA numbers...I think that there is a level of doom-mongering at play here on their part.
BC 4/10/12
What WERE the MCL's BEFORE Fukishima?
What were the MCL's before the EPA raised the MCL's by factors ranging from 100-7,000,000?
http://digitaljournal.com/article/305386
EPA MCL's same 1963-present.
There was talk of EPA changing the limits, but to my knowledge that has not happened. As for your question of what the limits were pre-Fukushima, the answer is that they have been the same from 1963 to present.
http://www.iem-inc.com/tooldc.html
Compare this to the table I already referenced. They are the same.
Look, I am on the anti side. I want to see this stuff cleaned up as best can be, I want to see human health protected. But my point is that Enenews is not correct when they say the levels in milk are over the MCL for drinking water, and further, the gov't has not changed the intervention levels post 3/11.
All this is bad, but let's keep it as accurate as we can. There is enough obfuscation out there already.
BC 4/13/12