France blocks shipment of radioactive mushrooms

FRANCE has stopped a large shipment of Belarusian mushrooms contaminated with radioactivity from Chernobyl, but officials said there was no link with a radioactive cloud from Russia last month.

A spokesman for IRSN, the French nuclear safety institute, said customs officials found that a 3.5-ton shipment of mushrooms coming from Belarus through Frankfurt was contaminated with Caesium-137, a radioactive waste product of nuclear reactors.

While the contaminated mushrooms did not represent a health threat to consumers, the shipment would be destroyed in a specialised incinerator in coming days, the IRSN said.

“There is no link with the ruthenium 106 pollution,” the official said. Earlier this month, the IRSN said that a cloud containing radioactive ruthenium 106 originating from southern Russia had blown over large parts of Europe in October, but added that there was no danger for citizens.

Russia later confirmed it had measured ruthenium pollution at nearly 1,000 times normal levels in the Ural Mountains, but did not acknowledge any nuclear accident. “As the mushrooms came from Belarus, it is very likely the contamination originated in Chernobyl,” the official said.

Chernobyl, in Ukraine, is just south of the border with Belarus and was the site of a major nuclear disaster in 1986. Caesium-137, which has a 30-year halflife, is still widely found in the areas around Chernobyl.

The IRSN said it was highly unusual for such a large shipment of mushrooms to be stopped and none of the produce had made it on to French retail markets, adding that eating tens of kilos of the Belarus mushrooms would expose a consumer to a radioactivity level similar to natural ambient radioactivity during a whole year.

Mushrooms concentrate radioactivity because their thread-like root systems spread over a large area for several metres on the surface around the plant.