Reply #74: The FACTS are never disingenuous

[PamW]

So to summarize from your (in)credible source (an illustrated picture book, hahaha)... the ATF uses carbon dating to ensure that alcohol is not produced from petroleum. This is a little bit different than your pathetic spin that the USG requires alcohol to be radioactive. But this is typical of the kind intellectual dishonesty that everyone should have come to expect from anyone related to the nuke industry.
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I don't know how you can call what I said "disingenuous". I am merely reporting a fact and gave a reputable reference for same.

The technique used by the ATF really isn't "carbon dating". Carbon dating looks at the ratios of the relative concentration of C-14 to its radioactive daughter product, and infers from that the age of the material. Because C-14 has a 5700 year half-life, there really hasn't been enough time to build up appreciable amounts of radioactive daughter products.

No, the technique Professor Muller discusses is actually much simpler. Carbon in the eco-sphere is radioactive due to C-14 produced by the interaction of fast neutrons from the Sun on the Nitrogen in our atmosphere. Because Mother Nature makes radioactive C-14 naturally, ALL recently grown plant material is radioactive. Therefore, any alcohol produced by fermentation of recently grown plant material is also radioactive. The ATF is simply looking for that radioactivity, and as I reported accurately, REQUIRES that the radioactivity exceed the level of about 240 pCi / kg in order to ensure that the alcohol came from recently grown plant material.

I'm sorry you have trouble with unit conversions. Contrary to your statement, unit conversion are merely a rather TRIVIAL arithmetic operation, and not "intellectually dishonest". As a scientist, I want my posts to by complete and informative, and so I don't "dumb them down" for the benefit of the "mathematically challenged".

My previous post just shows that the concentration of radioactivity on the strawberries under discussion was just 1/20-th the concentration of radioactivity that we can expect in ALL our food just because Mother Nature makes C-14 naturally. ( I'm sorry I used 1/20, which is one of those dreaded "fractions" that the mathematically challenged seem to have some a difficult time with. Would the equivalent 5% make it easier for you? )

If someone follows the lead of idiots like Helen Caldicott who tell you that any amount of radiation or radioactivity is going to give you cancer, so that the radioactivity due to Fukushima is going to give you cancer; then by a factor of 20 times, the natural radioactivity due to the C-14 produced by Mother Nature is also going to give you cancer.

If you are going to avoid eating strawberries with Fukushima radioactivity on them, then to be logically consistent, you would have to avoid eating ALL foods, because ALL your foods have 20 times as much radioactivity as that contributed by Fukushima.

You'd have to stop eating now and forever. That would indeed be a solution to a most vexing
problem. It's a Darwinian solution at its best; survival of the smartest.

PamW