Milk sold near Chernobyl still radioactive, 30 years after the accident... Cesium persists for hundreds of years
Saturday, April 30, 2016 by: Amy Goodrich
(NaturalNews) 30 years ago the world's worst nuclear catastrophe at Chernobyl in Ukraine released a lot of radioactive particles into the atmosphere which killed 31 people and made an 18.6-sqaure-mile exclusion zone around the reactor unsafe for humans for at least the next 20,000 years.
Gubarevichi, a small town in Belarus, just on the edge of the Chernobyl exclusion zone, seems to have picked up life and the authoritarian government of this agriculture-dependent nation is determined to restore its land for farm use.
The Associated Press (AP) reporters ventured into this "safe" zone and visited a farmer, Nikolai Chubenok, who herds 50 dairy cows and produces up to two tons of milk every day for a local factory, Milkavita, that produces milk and Parmesan cheese for the local and Russian market.
His farm lays just 28 miles north of the shuttered Chernobyl site, and a mile from the boundary of a zone where radioactive contamination from fallout is the highest and all public access and inhabitation are restricted.
Radioactive levels in milk 10 times higher than food safety limits When Nikolai kindly offered the reporters a fresh glass of milk, they politely declined and sent the sample to a laboratory, which found radioactivity levels to be higher than the nation's food safety limits.
The lab screened the milk for strontium-90, a radioactive isotope linked to cancers and cardiovascular disease. According to the Belarusian Agriculture Ministry, levels shouldn't exceed 3.7 becquerels per kilogram. However, the sample from Nikolai's farm contained 37.5 becquerels.
These findings are in strong contrast with internal tests run by Milkavita. According to them, every six months' tests that are run show traces of radioactive isotopes in their milk to be well below the safety limits.
"It's impossible. We do our own testing. There must have been a mix-up," Milkavita's chief engineer told the AP journalists.
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Poster Comment:
Chernobyl is still bad news.
