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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   25431 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 18, 2025

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In lighter news, the FDA has taken it upon themselves to improve shrimp welfare by calling on Americans not to eat certain shrimps.

The level of Cs-137 detected in the detained shipment was approximately 68 Bq/kg, which is below FDA’s Derived Intervention Level for Cs-137 of 1200 Bq/kg. At this level, the product would not pose an acute hazard to consumers.

Then why recall them?

Avoiding products like the shipment FDA tested with similar levels of Cs-137 is a measure intended to reduce exposure to low-level radiation that could have health impacts with continued exposure over a long period of time.

This is a weird statement. If you are concerned about radioactivity below 1.2kBq/kg, then why not have a lower threshold?

At the bottom of the page they state:

Consumers who have symptoms should contact their health care provider to report their symptoms and receive care.

Comedy gold. They should mention that the relevant health care provider for symptoms from a couple of 100 Bq of Cs-137 is your psychiatrist.

The steelman, from what I can tell, is that this is concerning not because of the dose but because it is unclear where the Cs-137 is coming from:

FDA determined that product from PT. Bahari Makmur Sejati violates the Federal Food, Drug, & Cosmetic Act in that it appears to have been prepared, packed, or held under insanitary conditions whereby it may have become contaminated with Cs-137 and may pose a safety concern.

Cs-137 is a classic mid-lifetime (T1/2=30a) fission product. Whenever you have an atmospheric nuclear weapon test or a reactor disaster, it will be one of the relevant radioisotopes.

In its decay, it also emit 660keV gamma rays, which together with its half-life make it a widely used gamma ray source.

Without knowing what exactly is going on, I see two main possibilities. One would be that the shrimps were fed contaminated food, e.g. freshwater fish from some lakes in Scandinavia. Per the FDA release, they do not believe that this is what is going on.

The other plausible explanation I can think of is contamination with Cs-137 used for food irradiation. WP:

Conversely, caesium-137 is water-soluble and poses a risk of environmental contamination. Insufficient quantities are available for large-scale commercial use as the vast majority of Caesium-137 produced in nuclear reactors is not extracted from spent nuclear fuel. An incident where water-soluble caesium-137 leaked into the source storage pool requiring NRC intervention has led to near elimination of this radioisotope.

Food irradiation is safe for the food if you take great care to not get your radioisotopes into your food. This is typically easy because you can encase your source in a few millimeters of stainless steel, and plenty of gamma rays will still make it through. If you get any radioactivity into your food during irradiation, then something has gone terribly wrong. Given the ungodly amounts of activity involved with food irradiation, this is a major concern.

I admit that my knee-jerk reaction to the FDA warning was to think that an agency which warned about a dose which was a whopping 6% of its threshold had probably not been DOGEd sufficiently. On further reflection, I think that it is more like faintly smelling smoke suddenly. Not itself very concerning, but if you did not expect to smell smoke then it might be indicative that there is a worrisome problem somewhere.

This looks like a very fishy (ba-dum-tss!) situation. I'd agree it looks very much like somebody mishandled a radiation source and the contamination went into the food supply, which is horribly bad. And for FDA it may be nearly impossible to find how it happened, because there are so many moving parts, and people would not be very forthcoming given it's a really bad fuckup. So FDA has a case on their hands where something is obviously very wrong and they can't fix it. So they do "something" because something must be done - they kill the messenger, i.e. recall the slightly contaminated shrimp, because that's the only thing they can do, and if later it turns out the source is found, they could say "we did all we could!".

Every few years a radioisotope source from an abandoned hospital or lab in a third world country goes missing and ends up in a junkyard. There are hundreds of slightly radioactive buildings in Northern Mexico because one guy sold a dismantled cobalt-60 radiotherapy machine to a scrap metal company.

The nightmare scenario is that there is some town in Indonesia somewhere whose entire water supply has been contaminated because someone threw away some old medical equipment.

There are hundreds of slightly radioactive buildings in Northern Mexico because one guy sold a dismantled cobalt-60 radiotherapy machine to a scrap metal company.

I recall a similar apartment building somewhere in SE Asia that wound up providing decently strong evidence (for a given value of "strong"; low-level exposures tend to have weak effects regardless of which side of the debate one is on) for opponents of LNT; that is, cancer rates were lower in the irradiated apartment building than its neighbors, despite similar demographics.

Edit: it was in fact Cobalt-60 contamination in Taiwan:

Based on the investigation conducted by the RSPAT,[10] the total number of cancer deaths among these residents is only 7 in 200,000 person-years or 3.5 deaths per 100,000 person-years—only 3% of the rate (i.e., 116) expected for the general population

The one I always think of -

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident

Consumers who have symptoms should contact their health care provider to report their symptoms and receive care.

“Please, stop calling us.”

I think you’re correct about smelling smoke. Especially if the sampling was random. There’s no guarantee this was the only contaminated shipment, so further investigation is justified.

Also, this might be the most exciting thing that’s happened to them since RFK took office.

Incidental contamination isn't impossible -- they're usually Cobalt, but Cesium has gotten into the scrap metal supply before -- but yeah, accidental food irradiation release seems more plausible. In turn, it's weirder, though: while there are some types of food irradiation involve just slapping raw and open product through the processing line (eg, fruit), for seafood specifically the norm is to pack the food first and then nuke the hell out of it. It's not great to have it on the wrapper, or maybe the original packaging is getting opened and the product repacked in ways that would get the material onto the food, but it's a weird bit compared to everything else being discussed.

I only glanced at this story briefly last night, but: isn't 68 Bq/kg less than the radioactivity of bananas?

I also concluded that they must be worried about contamination that they missed - if some cesium capsule leaked a tiny bit into these shrimp, does that mean there was a tiny leak, or does that mean there was a big leak but this particular sample only included a tiny bit of it? Imagine if the most contaminated packages ended up near the center of a different shipping container, hidden from detection by a meter of cargo in every direction.

Switching from normal brain to crazy internet-addled brain: is there any chance this could have been a penetration test rather than unintentional contamination? Customs doesn't check every import for radioactivity because they're worried about shrimp with the power of bananas, they do it because after 9/11 we spent like a billion dollars on radiation portal monitors designed to detect "dirty bombs". If I was a psychopath looking to slip something by those monitors, I wouldn't want to blow my shot without a test run first, and I would want that run to have some kind of relatively-innocuous plausible alternative explanation in case the pen test didn't pen. If a dirty bomb hidden inside a bunch of radiation shielding still leaks as much gamma as a pallet of barely-contaminated frozen shrimp, well, then, barely contaminate some shrimp and send them through first and see if anybody freaks out.

My tinfoil theory is that this is a false flag by the Louisiana seafood industry to scare people out of buying imported shrimp.

"After an incident involving an undersea nuclear test, Forrest and Dan turn out to be the only shrimpers catching non-radioactive shrimp..."

It checks out- everyone already knows in the back of their mind that the Chinese have no standards for what they feed their shrimp and crawfish before exporting the things.

Also, I checked the banana stats. A single banana might output 15 Bq…but this is not directly comparable to the dose from eating one. That has more to do with how the body eliminates the potassium. It’s different for every isotope, and the FDA doesn’t even bother to set a standard for potassium.

The work to intentionally contaminate some shrimp is going to bring plenty of scrutiny. That’s like preparing to hijack a plane by carjacking an 18-wheeler.

I hear that if you eat them you'll gain the powers of a shrimp: having EAs actually care about you.

You could just go to a tanning booth.

I'll become your friendly neighborhood Shrimp-Man and the FDA can't stop me.

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