We have several places that serve afternoon tea. Nothing to write home about. Just standard finger food fare. I wished fast food chains would serve a decent cup of hot tea with their value meals. How many times have I thought the burger and fries would be better with some Dan Cong or Puer. Its not hard to bring your own tea and add to hot water in a restaurant. Its usually the second cup refill that causes the awkward moment at the table. Im often more happy with the iced tea than not.
Jim
PS Where are the tea plantations in Japan. I havent seen any indications to the north. Fortunately I have enough sencha, gyokuro, and matcha for a lifetime or in my case approaching half life.
--PS Where are the tea plantations in Japan. I havent seen any
--indications to the north. Fortunately I have enough sencha, gyokuro,
--and matcha for a lifetime or in my case approaching half life.
blame mother nature or us...again we have messed up the earth, this time its radiation.. Last time it was the gulf oil leak, we really need to stop this..
The tea plantations are all more than 200 miles south of Fugashima. They have all been very heavily tested and show NO signs of radiation i air, earth, water and plants. There are none more than perhaps100 mile north of Tokyo, if that far
There are always signs of radiation in the air, just as there is radiation everywhere.
The bricks your house are made of are full of potassium isotopes, and they are fairly strong alpha emitters. You can fog a sheet of Tri-X in about a week with a brick.
Bananas and tomatoes are fairly radioactive because they contain potassium also. Tobacco pulls heavier elements out of the soil and is very, very radioactive. A pack of cigarettes will set a geiger counter off pretty dramatically.
Now, the nifty thing about elements is that we can separate them. We can take a sample, break it up into individual parts and tell you what is in those parts. If you take a water sample today, you'll find there is radioactive potassium in it, whiwhich is a natural product. You'll also find stuff like strontium isotopes left over from nuclear bomb testing in the fifties in the water.
Now, the thing about radioactive elements specifically is that when they give of radiation, they turn into different elements. The more radioactive an isotope is, the more quickly it turns into something else.
What got released from the plant at fukushima were mostly the primary breakdown products of uranium: a cesium isotope and an iodine isotope. The iodine isotope may have been detected in the US, but since it has a half life of 11 days and turns into something stable, nobody really much cares about it in the long term. The cesium is more of a big deal and the problem with that is that there is so much natural Ce-137 left over from above-ground nuclear testing that we're always seeing big spikes.
What we saw in the press were mostly reports of wide-spectrum radiation detectors.... which are effectively not very useful because there is so much natural radiation floating around out there. There are always big peaks and dips all the time.
Anyway, so what you care about as far as environmental contamination of crops is specifically cesium, and you need to find that with a chemical test, not just with a geiger counter. If you put a geiger counter on tea, you'll find that it, like all living things, is somewhat radioactive and that's just fine and isn't a worry. If you do a chemical test and find cesium, that's bad. But, it doesn't mean the cesium came from Fukushima either.... since it's so long-lived, there is plenty of it left from other sources.
If you do a test and find iodine-131, you just put it in a box and wait a couple months until it goes away.
But just looking with a geiger counter will show up lots of normal natural radiation, lots of radiation left over from above-ground nuclear testing, and a lot of other confounding stuff which is far stronger than any recent leakage.
I do not mind at all such "natural" potassium isotopes. Why do you speak about alpha emitters? As far as I know, the isotopes contained in the bricks of my house are beta emitters. Beta emitters are less nocive for health than alpha ones.
Anyway, our body naturally has potassium isotopes. As well as other radioactive elements. Radioactivity of a human body is about 8 000 Bq.
We're not speaking about the same level of radioactivity. If bananas are "fairly radioactive", I wonder what is the adjective you would put for a scintigraphy (in MBq-GBq) and daily releases in Fukushima (in trillions Bq).
I would be very interested in seeing a geiger counter measuring the radioactivity of a pack of cigarettes. Could you please tell me what is the radioactive element that will be detected by the geiger counter in these cigarettes?
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