Radioactivity in Tobacco • Hacker News Board

Re: Radioactivity in Tobacco

#61

Post by Symbiote » Sat, May 02, 2020, 1:59 PM UTC

ccffpphh wrote: post #5

tdy721 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, don’t eat the tomato leaves for one. If you compare the mass of undried tobacco leaves to a similar amount of food, I would guess similar exposures. I would also guess that the fruit contains more water, therefore a slightly less concentration of radiation. It’s also about the system, lungs vs digestion. Digestion has been dealing with natural radiation for longer than we have been smoking. Good question! I als…

Most food is irradiated, yes. Prevents potatoes from sprouting, sterilizes tons of food, etc. I am very familiar with that, but didn't realize that radionuclides were ever-present in fertilizers. I grow my own tea, and use fertilizer. Am I at risk for the same issues after processing the leaves? Additionally, would this then extend to cannabis as well? While they aren't leaves, I'm assuming that radium would end up t…

> Most food is irradiated, yes.

No, far from it. Extremely little food is irradiated.

"103,000 tonnes of food products were irradiated on mainland United States in 2010"

"6,876 tonnes of food products were irradiated in European Union countries in 2013"

The average American consumes a tonne of food per year, and the average European probably isn't much different. That's 0.03% of food in the USA, and less than 0.001% respectively.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_irradiation

Re: Radioactivity in Tobacco

#62

Post by pvaldes » Sat, May 02, 2020, 3:51 PM UTC

throw_away wrote: post #23

> Tobacco farmers use fertilizer to help their crops grow. These fertilizers contain a naturally-occurring radionuclide, radium. Radium radioactively decays to release radon gas, which then rises from the soil around the plants. As the plant grows, the radon from fertilizer, along with naturally-occurring radon in surrounding soil and rocks, cling to the sticky hairs on the bottom of tobacco leaves, called trichomes.…

> is there something particular about tobacco trichomes?

Absolutely nothing

Well... Either this people are genius that discovered a way to suck and harvest expensive argon and helium from the air, with the help of super-sticking tomato that traps them magically in a everest size (from the point of view of a radon atom) trichome.

... or maybe the history is false and noble gases still keep their reputation of not interacting with anything and being difficult to trap.

I would put my money in the second possibility. It looks exactly like the kind of convoluted history that tobacco makers would create to avoid paying compensations to the families of people affected by cancer ("Tobacco is safe, healthy for children and medicinal, manure makers dose our nice flowers with radiation and are the real responsible, so should share the bills").

I wouldn't rush to seed Tobacco in Fukushima.

Re: Radioactivity in Tobacco

#63

Post by ISL » Sat, May 02, 2020, 5:47 PM UTC

raverbashing wrote: post #34

ISL wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Radium is also present in Brazil Nuts. Some plants aggregate chemical elements more than others. We use them to linearize the energy scale in lower-background germanium detectors. Grocery-store potassium chloride sets our energy calibration. The bad thing about radium in tobacco, I am told, is that the alpha-emitting radium (or the daughters) tends to aggregate in the lungs. Alphas do a lot of nearby damage, hence a…

> Grocery-store potassium chloride sets our energy calibration. I'm guessing this gives a new meaning for the phrase "banana for scale"

Could be, though the KCl is a better standard. We know how much KCl we have, and the natural abundance of K40 is well-known.

You'd need a dedicated campaign to assess the potassium abundance in the "standard" banana before you could use it at better than ~100+% errorbars.

The salt-substitute shaker is probably a <5% standard, and we've been using the same one for years.... :).