The wild boar paradox and the future of nuclear energy

In today’s Big Story Podcast, in many regions of Europe, wild boars roam the landscape. Also, they’re radioactive. For a long time, it was assumed the Chernobyl disaster was the cause, and that’s still partly true. But the real answer goes back even further and offers us a glimpse of how the by-products of nuclear technology can lay dormant for decades, only detected in the most visible part of a system we’re still learning to understand.

Becky Ferreira, a science writer and regular contributor at Motherboard, is on today’s episode.

“I think it was a really huge shock because nobody had really considered that the weapons testing would still be around in that quantity,” said Ferreira.

This is the wild boar paradox, and this is what it can teach us about nuclear technologies past, present and future.

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You can also find it at thebigstorypodcast.ca.