RE: the article about the contaminated fawn at Brookhaven lab

["Neil, David M" <neildm@ID.DOE.GOV>]

Cs137 is widespread in soil, a legacy of atmospheric testing (fallout).  Including your back yard. :-)  Plants take it up as a calcium mimic.  In analysis of grazing/browsing animals, you can expect to find it in low but detectable levels.  The prime rib and baked potato you had the other night both had amounts detectable by looking hard enough.

 

Analysis as I knew it for gross radioactivity was around 2Kg of chopped meat in a Marinelli beaker counted overnight with a GeLi.  A smaller liver sample was similarly analysed.

 

It is interesting to note that  during the time I was involved with game (roadkill) sampling at INEEL, the highest concentration I recall was from a pronghorn fawn.  Reconcentration from nursing, perhaps?

-----Original Message-----
From: Norman Cohen [mailto:ncohen12@HOME.COM]
Sent: Tuesday, February 19, 2002 1:47 PM
To: AndrewsJP@AOL.COM
Cc: circhotline@nydailynews.com; radsafe@list.vanderbilt.edu
Subject: Re: the article about the contaminated fawn at Brookhaven lab

Hi John,
I'm confused. Does this mean that everything at Brookhaven was hunky-dory? You don't consider this report, even with the reporter's lack of scientific precision, serious?
 
 

Norm

AndrewsJP@AOL.COM wrote:

This story by TAMER EL-GHOBASHY contains a number of missing elements.  1) The fawn was contaminated with RADIOACTIVITY, not RADIATION.  The reporter should know the difference.  2) The radioactive material was not identified, so no hazard judgement can be made of this information.  The reporter should determine what the radioactive material(s) is/are and report that as part of the report. 3) The units of radioactivity are incomplete not giving the unit of mass associated with the radioactivity in picocuries.  Such a number indicates that the activity, only a few disentegrations per minute is the total in the carcass, not per gram or kilogram. It takes trillions of picocuries to be significant.  Update the story to clarify this report.

The report has been widely circulated on the internet.

John Andrews
Knoxville, Tennessee

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