Radioactive tobacco to hit market

[PVPuff&Stuff]

tobacco plants are very effective radiation sinks...they absorb these heavy metals from surrounding soils. Not quite as effective as fungus like mushrooms, but they suck it up pretty quickly.


There was quite a bit of testing to find effective sinks for Chernobyl, but I can't find them online these days. I do remember tobacco, mushrooms, and another plant with sticky trichomes being used to suck radiation out of the environment there.


In this article, they're talking about tobacco being grown in ......ushima....THIS YEAR....and being put on the market with no government control over radiation limits.


For those not paying attention..........ushima currently has broken reactors and spent fuel ponds spewing radioactive particles into the air, water and ground.


This freaked me out...so I contacted Dekang today. Much to my relief, they confirm that they do not use Japanese tobacco. For our Dekang customers...I totally just saved you like 400 bucks on a geiger counter.


Some information for those that are curious below.

494 leaf tobacco farmers in ...ushima will grow leaf tobacco this year and sell it to Japan Tobacco (JT), a monopoly in Japan (50% of shares owned by the Ministry of Finance) and the 3rd largest tobacco and cigarettes manufacturer in the world, next to British American Tobacco.


Did you know that there is no national safety standard for radioactive materials in leaf tobacco?

From the EPA at their page here

How does radioactive material get into a cigarette?


The tobacco leaves used in making cigarettes contain radioactive material, particularly lead-210 and polonium-210. The radionuclide content of tobacco leaves depends heavily on soil conditions and fertilizer use.


Soils that contain elevated radium lead to high radon gas emanations rising into the growing tobacco crop. Radon rapidly decays into a series of solid, highly radioactive metals (radon decay products). These metals cling to dust particles which in turn are collected by the sticky tobacco leaves. The sticky compound that seeps from the trichomes is not water soluble, so the particles do not wash off in the rain. There they stay, through curing process, cutting, and manufacture into cigarettes.Lead-210 and Polonium-210 can be absorbed into tobacco leaves directly from the soil. But more importantly, fine, sticky hairs (called trichomes) on both sides of tobacco leaves grab airborne radioactive particles.


For example, phosphate fertilizers, favored by the tobacco industry, contain radium and its decay products (including lead-210 and polonium-210). When phosphate fertilizer is spread on tobacco fields year after year, the concentration of lead-210 and polonium-210 in the soil rises.

All the dust at the end of the video...