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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   12286 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.

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.

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.

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