Germans like the manly sport of wild boar hunting, but they may have to pass on the pig roast. In fact, they may have to build more toxic waste dumps, because the radiation released in the Chernobyl disaster is working its way up the food chain…

Via RawStory, here is news from Der Speigel.

Many of the boar that are killed land on the plates of diners across Germany, but it is forbidden to sell meat containing high levels of radioactive caesium-137 — any animals showing contamination levels higher than 600 becquerel per kilogram must be disposed of. But in some areas of Germany, particularly in the south, wild boar routinely show much higher levels of contamination. According to the Environment Ministry, the average contamination for boar shot in Bayerischer Wald, a forested region on the Bavarian border with the Czech Republic, was 7,000 becquerel per kilogram. Other regions in southern Germany aren’t much better.

Radioactive pollution causes cancer and birth defects and hangs around forever. It travels on the wind and in the water. There’s no easy way out of our energy dilemma, but nuclear fission is a risky way to boil water.