Numlock Sunday: Paris Martineau on those radioactive shrimp

Photo by Fernando Andrade on Unsplash

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.

This week, I spoke to the great Paris Martineau who wrote What Is Really Going on With All This Radioactive Shrimp? for Consumer Reports. Here’s what I wrote about it:

In just the past six weeks, hundreds of thousands of pounds of shrimp have been pulled from supermarkets because they may be radioactive. All the shrimp were processed by BMS Foods in Indonesia, which was singlehandedly responsible for a third of all Indonesian shrimp imports from January to July. After cesium-137 was detected in the company’s shipping containers at four ports, Indonesia’s nuclear agency launched an investigation and found widespread contamination in the Cikande industrial area where the shrimp was packaged. The source of the contamination is a nearby steel manufacturer. Investigators think that the steel company smelted some cesium-137 (perhaps from a medical device) and dusted the region in the process, affectin…