[maxbond]

Your claim is that bioaccumulation is not a problem because a.) It has not reached a level dangerous to humans (through direct consumption) and b.) Life is thriving in Pripyat. a.) is orthogonal, and b.) is encouraging but doesn't establish that there _isn't_ a problem here.

Mostly what I take issue to is that you're saying people need to stop being concerned about something, but the reasons you gave didn't really support that conclusion. I dunno if there's a problem here or not really, but I don't think we should dismiss it in this manner. It's sort of like the inverse of fear mongering, though fear mongering is probably more dangerous, so I only mean that directionally and not proportionally (eg I don't take issue nearly as strongly as I would a fear mongering comment, I think your comment is largely fine, but that's what I find objectionable).

[mlyle]

If bioaccumulation hasn't posed a problem yet, it doesn't seem to be too much of a concern.

The dose rate near Chernobyl has fallen 2 orders of magnitude. Further, now the vast majority of the activity is Cs-137, which is excreted pretty quickly. Further, the waste is getting buried and further removed from the food chain (though Russia recently stirred up soil there, which isn't ideal).

[godelski]

> Your claim is that bioaccumulation is not a problem because

We have decades of living with the results (event was 1986), decades of scientific research (not just reactors, but medicine and space), and high political motivation to demonstrate harm (as it shows the failure of the USSR and communism). That in all this time and with all this money and motivation, we have not gathered data that conclusively says that the bioaccumulation is a problem. That is the basis of my claim: almost 40 years of analysis of the exact event and 80 years of health physics (the study of radiation on humans).

Mostly what I take issue to is that you're saying science doesn't matter. At least this is how it comes off. I actually agree that point a and b are orthogonal. The second paragraph is written to address a second point. I have a complaint about a common false fear mongering claim by the article and I also add some information that is about the article's main topic. They don't become a singular argument due to proximity. Paragraph 2's only mention of humans is that they probably shouldn't live there, which is difficult to confuse with "it is safe to live in Chernobyl because bavarian boar, hunted a thousand kilometers away, is safe to eat despite their radiation levels." Forgive me, but it is difficult to not feel frustrated and interpret you as not actually reading what I wrote. Definitely not in good faith.

[maxbond]

ETA: Looking around the thread a bit, I'm wondering if maybe you're experiencing something I've experienced on this site, where a thread gets really big and some of the people are rude and genuinely in bad faith, and it all becomes so frustrating and overwhelming that it blends together and you can't tell who is just disagreeing with you and who has arbitrarily decided you're everything that's wrong with the world and it's okay to treat you like a punching bag?

I have nothing but sympathy for that, it's bullshit. And if I had any role in causing it to happen by being the first person to reply to you, I apologize. All I have to say on it, and this is from a place of being a hypocrite who struggles with this myself, is that he who fights monsters must take care he does not become one - don't let the internet poison your ideas about how conversation works, and put you on the defensive in every interaction. It's so difficult to find common ground and explore disagreement from that position.

---

Sorry it's taken me a while to respond, I got busy.

I think you should recalibrate your sense of what it means for something to be in good or bad faith. You deemed both of the subthreads[1] here to be bad faith, but in my reading, neither of them are. The other subthread was snarky, which is different from being in bad faith.

If you don't feel I read you as closely as I should have it wasn't sufficiently respectful, I can understand that being frustrating, but that isn't actually what bad faith is - I didn't misrepresent your views or the facts, I didn't employ manipulative language or sophistry to try and trap you in a rhetorical cage, et cetera.

If you don't feel sufficiently respected, well, you don't owe us anything, you don't have to engage, but throwing around accusations of bad faith because you don't feel like people are reading you closely enough is - well, not great faith.

What I took issue with is you closing the book on something and telling people the debate was over, not even because you had new evidence but because you didn't personally feel moved by the evidence. It's kinda rich for you to then lecture me about being unscientific.

My contributions to science have thus far been negligible (the company I was going to continue my lab tech career with froze hiring during the pandemic, so I had to change lanes to software engineering, c'est la vie), but when I was a lab technician, I actively practiced being comfortable with ambiguity, acknowledging what I do and don't know, and separating observation from interpretation. If I had told my PI that we didn't need to look into boars for the reasons you gave, I would have gotten clowned on.

That's not to say every discussion needs to be scientifically rigorous (I consider myself an empiricist but not a scientist because I don't regular use the scientific method, I operate with a fairly loose level of rigor as software engineer), but I rolled my eyes pretty hard when you tried to come at me for being unscientific.

[1] Oh boy, this thread got a lot bigger. I meant this one. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36205287

[godelski]

> ETA: ... treat you like a punching bag?

This is definitely something I picked up on and did apologize in one case where I realized there was a clear disconnect. I find that this is extremely common on the internet and it often just pushes me to stop talking (but some days I'm pulled back into the old addiction).

I'll also say that this comment has made me gain a lot of respect to you. And I must also apologize to you for being antagonistic and escalating it. You're not alone in that struggle. I do think it has become the norm of internet discussions and that at times we need to take a step back and "reset". I really do appreciate that you have taken the initiative to do so.

Maybe I can suggest a strategy I try (but clearly am not consistent in implementing). If I'm adding something to someone's comment (additional information instead of rebutting) I try to make the first line of the comment indicate this or have a positive response like "Good point! In addition..." Sometimes I find agreeing comments turn to fights. Easier to see as a third party. I also try to internalize that the way language works is: there's what one intends to say (what's in their head), what is said (how that thought is lossy encoded into speech), and what is heard (what is lossy decoded into listener's head). We all need to try to do a better job at trying to hear what the other person is trying to say, rather than what is said. But emotions get the best of us and our lazy/lossy decoders fill in a lot of info that may not be intended.

The best strategy I found is to just log off. But considering your comment, I'm going to respond and I'll do so in detail. And if you got other strategies I'm also open. It is a learning process

--

> Bad faith

I think this has to do with our decoders. It also seems that we have different definitions for bad faith. Snarky would be included in mine as the setting is about discussion accurate information rather than the joking that may happen when sitting around with friends having beers or whatever. Additionally, self-deception is included in my definition, and one does not need to intentionally misrepresent an argument or do an active form of deception. An example of this is actually all too common on the internet (and especially around discussions of nuclear technologies) is to argue strongly about an area one has little to no domain expertise in. This is common on the internet as many do watch educational videos that give a high level overview of a subject (often with bad information) and the viewer convinces themselves (self-deception) that they are qualified to expertly educate others on this subject matter (fwiw, I should mention that I have a degree in physics and have directly worked on nuclear shielding technologies and have extensive experience with radiation simulating, Both physical and computational). Another common one is the "just asking questions" version, which is just sealioning. It is hard to tell if this is used intentionally to cause disruption/confusion (e.g. Koch brothers on Global Warming) or innocent. Regardless, it does have the same result. I want to point this out because considering our above dash discussion, we should recognize that a lot of internet speech looks like we've just normalized behavior out of the CIA's disruption manual [0,1]. I do think a lot of bad faith conversations have been normalized and we do it unintentionally (myself included).

> ... closing the book ... didn't personally feel moved by the evidence

It is not that, it is that bio-accumulation was already considered. The boar are accumulating Cesium-137, typically through the ingestion of mushrooms, which grab it from the soil. Biological half-life (how long for half to be expelled from the body) is 70 days[2]. The reason this was not directly discussed is that there was already a large margin of safety in place and that this does not disrupt the thesis of my argument: You have to eat so much red meat that you'd be at a high risk of adverse health effects (heart attack, cardiovascular disease, and even cancer) before you reach a level where you should be concerned with the effects of radiation. The radiation target used was the EU guidelines for yearly protracted dosages (20mSv/yr) which already has a built in margin of safety as we typically don't see measurable increases of lifetime cancer risk until at least double that (and a low risk at that level). The frustration with many of those that responded to me is that one side of this argument was clearly ignored: the meat consumption. We are talking about health risks after all. If I said that the drinking water is poisonous, but did not note that you had to consume 100 liters in a single sitting, you would have every right to call me out and mock me as water toxicity kicks in at 6 liters. You would die from the water consumption long before you'd die of the poison. Your PI should clown on you if you did this. This is what I am doing with the boar narrative, it is the same scenario. You'll notice that every story that reports these boars state that they are over the legal limit and not a safe limit. The legal limit varies drastically by region. The EU has 600Bq/kg, Japan with 1kBq/kg, and Australia with 100Bq/kg. All three of these regions have radioactive boar btw. A 200Bq/kg boar in Australia is not more dangerous than a 200Bq/kg boar in Germany.

Similarly, bio-accumulation can happen with that poisonous water but we need to consider that the water is both difficult to obtain (it would be difficult to have an exclusive diet of wild board; radioactive or not) and that your body rids itself of poison (meaning that differential matters). I purposefully placed exceptionally large safety margins on the calculation (normal for radiation safety btw) as a means to simplify the argument (like you said, not everything has to be rigorous science) and even account for a wide variety of factors that would happen in real life (such as variance between boar, intravariance between cuts, and even factors like differing background radiation. The eater might be a Concord pilot). I would not expect someone with expertise in radiation safety (which there are plenty of HN users that are) to take issue with my claim.

I'm not sure what science you do, what is it? I'm assuming it doesn't have to do with particle physics?

[0] https://www.authenticcomms.co.uk/blog/the-1944-cia-guide-to-...

[1] https://www.hsdl.org/c/abstract/?docid=750070

[2] https://dec.alaska.gov/eh/radiation/half-lives-explained/

[maxbond]

Thank you for this response and for the advice. I really appreciate both. It's very difficult to keep faith in the discourse, and when we win little victories over our own worse natures together it helps a lot. And I genuinely appreciate the advice.

I don't want to take the time to respond in depth now (I will try to later), but just to answer your direct question, I studied and worked with algae, and in particular it's use in the remediation of water contaminated by uranium mining via bioaccumulation. I didn't bring this up to establish my credentials because I don't feel I'm any more qualified on this subject than a stranger on the internet with an interest in it (remember, I was a technician, I didn't get a bachelor's in biochemistry or anything like that), and I wasn't interested in anything bigger than a pillbug (let alone a boar), but there you go.

(I'm worried this will come off like a "gotcha": I don't mean it or see it that way, like I said, my experience is not definitive, I just want to answer since it's a direct question and think it's ha-ha funny not point-and-laugh funny.)

ETA: And if I'm perfectly honest, I too have become defensive and anticipate a high rate of discussions going poorly, and contribute to this self fulfilling prophecy. My language also raised the temperature needlessly, but more to the point, I didn't present this as a credential because I didn't have the emotional energy to defend it. It wasn't so long ago but feels like a lifetime, and it's taxing to reexamine the plans and passions that hit the cutting room floor one faithful day in March of 2020.

And that's why it stuck in my craw when you said I acted as of science didn't matter, because it cast a stone towards a place of nostalgia. And I overreacted and was pretty snarky in response, which is my bad.

[godelski]

Oh that definitely makes sense as to why this specific thing was brought up. To me it felt out of nowhere and reaching. This makes a ton more sense now and I can definitely see how your comment reads differently once I rebase myself. A lot of my frustration really has been about how people responding are ignoring the quantities of meat that need to be ingested.

I tend to not bring up my credentials because I feel like that shouldn't matter to the discussion. Plus, a lot of people have experience without credentials and I don't want to rub that in their face and argue from a place of authority. Just leads to credential bashing. One thing I would like to add about science, though, is that it is important to challenge the status quo. This is part of why I don't want credentials being at the forefront. Challenging should be encouraged. Of course, there's a right way and wrong way to do this. You have to do science and come up with a hypothesis/answer that has better explainability than the current consensus answer (if one exists). It is honestly one of the best learning tools you have. Every grad student spends a significant amount of time trying to reproduce works, as this is a way to learn. Either you verify the result (which is an unappreciated science win that we need more of) or you got a great new research direction (I'm no longer in physics). Many spend far too much time spinning their wheels as they fail to reproduce the results but are too self-critical to think that they might be right and the original work is wrong. It is an extremely important process and does teach you how to differentiate good works from bad works.

I figure you may be interested in some studies. I'd also encourage you to search some too. But you may find that there is far more work on tracing the radioactivity in the boar and other wildlife and far less on the actual health effects to the animals or populations. Again, we're pinned to government defined safety levels rather than risk of cancer[note]:

- Radiocesium accumulation and germline mutations in chronically exposed wild boar from Fukushima, with radiation doses to human consumers of contaminated meat[0]

> Hypothetical consumption of contaminated wild boar meat from radioactively contaminated areas in Fukushima, at the per capita pork consumption rate (12.9 kg y^−1), would result in an average effective annual dose of 0.9 mSv y^−1, which is below the annual ingestion limit of 1 mSv y^−1. Additionally, a consumption rate of about 1.4 kg y^−1 of the most contaminated meat in this study would not exceed annual ingestion limits.

This paper makes very similar conclusions as I do, just through a different point of view. They calculated dosage by predicting the consumption whereas I sought to find the amount you'd need to eat to reach the limit. But two things to note: first, the Japanese public dosage limit is much lower than that in the EU (1mSv/yr vs 20mSv/yr), and second, the dosage limit decreased post Fukushima[1]

- Evaluation of DNA damage and stress in wildlife chronically exposed to low-dose, low-dose rate radiation from the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant accident[2]

Paper: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34120002/

> Our results suggest that wild boar and snakes chronically exposed to LD-LDR radiation sufficient to prohibit human occupancy were not experiencing significant adverse health effects as assessed by biomarkers of DNA damage and stress.

- Exemplifying the “wild boar paradox”: dynamics of cesium-137 contaminations in wild boars in Germany and Japan[3]

Linking this one because there is a weird phenomena to be aware of (I just learned this too! I knew of a difference but not that it was almost 3x)

> The effective half-life of 137Cs in wild boar meat was much longer in Germany (7.3 y) than in Japan (2.6 y), respectively.

[note] A big reason for excessive safety factors is that you want to account for vulnerable people. This can be pregnant women, children, babies being breast fed, or even people with disabilities. My analysis and [0] account for this in one way, but not in a different. Nuance matters and shit is complicated. But here's some background.

[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S026974912...

[1] https://www.env.go.jp/en/chemi/rhm/basic-info/1st/pdf/basic-...

[2] https://cvmbs.source.colostate.edu/researchers-find-few-adve...

[3] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10967-022-08528-2

[hef19898]

You have the political thing backwards. In fact, everybody, from the Soviets over IAEA to European governments did everything they could to down play the impact. Measures covered things like not following up the health of liquidators, nor asking for it. Excluding radiation related health issues from work sicknisses and injuries. Publicly drinking potentially contaminated water on live TV to shownit is save after the public raised concerns. Murking the waters around cancer rate research. The list is incredibly long.

The only party that did push against Nuclear were the Greens. And it took them over 20 years to finally get a nuclear exit through in Germany.

And as far as thresholds are concerned: we have those for everything, from lead to small dust. Being above it doesn't outright kill people, but it defenitely doesn't improve longterm health. And yes, Bavarian boar has a tendency, in some regions, to be above radiation thresholds. That can be dorectly traced back to Chernobyl. You are trying to deny that by attacking the validity of those thresholds, thresholds that are coming from a ruling party in Bavaria that is in power sonce the 50s, is as pro-nuclear power as they come. I call that a straw man argument if there ever was one.

What that means for the safety of the exclusive zone is a different stroy, isn't it?

And no, as pointed out above, the health impact of Chernobyl, on everyone from Minsk and Pripyat to the liquidators and half of Western Europe was never really studied.

[godelski]

This doesn't appear to be accurate unless you're talking about East Germany[0]. In west Germany citizens were told to stay inside, not drink milk, and not eat mushrooms. Many articles are written each year on the "dangers" of eating mushrooms in Germany, due to radiation, such that just googling "German mushrooms" will turn up results about radiation. This is strong evidence counter to downplaying the event. Such obsession wouldn't exist if that were the case and we wouldn't even be having these discussions if this was true. I'd never have to write a comment about how 600Bq Bavarian boar pose a multiple magnitude higher risk of heart disease than radiation sickness.

We can dig up hundreds of articles from the late 80's and early 90's of Germany being concerned with the radiation of Chernobyl. The articles are still being written to this day.

> And yes, Bavarian boar has a tendency, in some regions, to be above radiation thresholds

And you'll find that my calculation is based on the most radioactive boar found, which was about 4x higher than the median. Don't change my argument. We were dealing with the worst case scenario, not the average, not the best, but the worst. Nor am I denying that boar surpass thresholds. Who made such a claim? I sure didn't. I only wrote about the dosage you'd get and how much you'd have to eat to achieve the EU public dosage limit (20mSv/yr), which itself is well below the measurable threshold for developing cancer within your lifetime. That is purposefully set with margins of safety. Just like my argument is that no reasonable person is going to consume that much radioactive boar meat and if somehow they did, radiation is far from their biggest concern.

Your heart will explode before you can eat the most radioactive bavarian boar money can buy. That's all I said, don't put words in my mouth. I find it incredibly offensive that you so blatantly misconstrue my argument and with absolutely no shame.

[0] https://www.dw.com/en/east-west-germany-dealt-differently-wi...

[hef19898]

Yeah, all true about West Germany. In the immediate aftermaths. And then you had whole trains of Ukrainian milk powder "vanishing" before analysis cpuld be done. You had said French politian drinking water on live TV. You had the Swedes, the first realizing something bad happened, waiting to anounce it just to be sure it wasn't them.

Long term, everybody silently agreed to just not look too closely anymore. And blame it all on bad Soviet tech. Until Fukushima happened, that was when things really changed across the political spectrum in Germany, other countries either stucknwith nuclear anyway (France), never got into it (Austria) or had a far easier time getting out of it.