Check Your Shrimp

Here’s a full post because the bits and pieces on Bluesky are not doing anyone any favors.

The FDA has warned that there may be radioactive cesium-137 in Great Value frozen shrimp from Walmart. No shrimp have been found to contain Cs-137, but “U.S. Customs and Border Protection alerted the FDA about possible Cesium-137, or Cs-137, detected in shipping containers at four U.S. ports.” This sentence says “possible Cs-137,” and who knows what that means, but the rest of the article treats it as if indeed Cs-137 was detected. The levels seem to be far below danger levels.

The first question the reporter should have asked was how sure CBP is that they detected Cs-137 and how they detected it. Ask to see the records. Be prepared to recognize the Cs-137 peak in the scan and how big it is. Yes, I know, haha.

Let’s go on to assume, as the FDA has, that this was an actual detection of Cs-137. It’s good to warn people, but the question that needs to be answered is how the Cs-137 got on (into?) the shipping containers. Cs-137 is a product of nuclear fission. It is used in industrial and medical applications, although there has been an effort to remove it from such use because of incidents like this and much worse.

One of those applications is to kill bacteria on seafood being packaged for sale. It’s likely that the processing facility for these shrimp has a Cs-137 source. The obvious question is whether it’s leaking. There should be sensors and alarms within the facility for that, although commercial firms are not always scrupulous about such things. The CBP finding should be communicated to the regulators in Indonesia, where the shrimp were processed, and those regulators should, posthaste, send someone with a radiation counter to check things out. People have died, and there have been very expensive messes from broken Cs-137 sources.

One way you can tell that the reporter and editor know nothing about Cs-137 sources is this next-to-last paragraph:

Cesium is a soft, flexible, silvery-white metal that becomes liquid near room temperature, but easily bonds with chlorides to create a crystalline powder, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Elemental cesium has nothing to do with it. Someone who knew what they were writing might have said

Cs-137 in radiation sources is in the form of cesium chloride, which looks like table salt.

Anyhow, if you’ve bought frozen shrimp at Walmart recently, you might want to check the lots listed in the article I linked or just throw it out.