DRAT you beat me to it.

Apparently, it also made the BEES THEMSELVES a demonic red.  And the  honey did NOT taste cherry-flavored but rather like cough syrup.

And the longer half-life is more harmless myth. That’s quack, completely, utter quack. Yes, exposure to quickly decaying substances which irradiate a lot is more harmful right then and there. But you aren’t gonna give thousands of children bone marrow cancer if those make it into the environment, because they decay quickly. But if you unleash something into the environment that keeps irradiating for practically ever, that’s the problem. And it doesn’t take a whole lot of plutonium to elevate the probability of cancer to one 1:1000 (in the nanogram region per person). It may not be as bad as smoking your entire life, but it’s not far off, and that’s a “one time shot”.

4 tons of plutonium inhaled, would be enough to wipe out the entire human population within a couple years, with room to spare. And that’s a very conservative estimate. Other sources think it could be as little as 1kg but that’s disputed.

HOWEVER.

The “extremely long half-life” of plutonium (or, in any event, of Pu-244, which is not the kind they make in reactors, which is Pu-239) means it is extremely benign from a radiological standpoint. It’s radioactive substances with short half-lives that are more dangerous. Period, dot, end of story. That’s what “long half-life” means–the atoms split much less often. It’s the difference between getting playfully squirted with a hose, and thrown over Niagara Falls. You could sprinkle plutonium on your breakfast cereal, for all the harm it would do you from the radiation.

It’s precisely because there is a safe level of exposure for long-lived radioisotopes that we can live on a planet with such vastly abundant crustal uranium (half-life ~4.5 billion years).

The moral: people who live in faint houses shouldn’t throw clues.

Can you provide a link to where you found this reference?  The additional chemical compounds stored in that just “sugary-water” would be interesting to read their Material Safety Data Sheets.  If it’s an unknown phenomenon caused by a material in those vats that wasn’t previously documented as affecting bees in that manner, that’d need to be noted at all other locations where that chemical compound can be found.  

But, that’d be the case of it here.  Since this particular case was in France, I can’t speak to what their safety protocols are like.  

For what its worth though, I’m a HUGE fan of the biogas power plant use of materials.  That’s an environmentally friendly, good thing and I’m glad to see industry using that.  It’s just that in this one case it sounds like a few employees should have not gotten lazy and just left the lids on the barrels until they were ready to use them.  

I’m guessing it was something likely that simple too since “The problem has already been addressed”.  It must have been something basic if they could implement the solution immediately like that.  Hopefully lesson learned.  

Still, the beekeepers are deserving of damages inflicted on them by the biogas company.  They were not a party to the conditions that caused their honey to be polluted; those who did the polluting reasonably aught to be accountable for those damages.  Accordingly, they owe them damages.  Do we have common ground on that soap?

*Edit: Checked on natural traces, there are some but insignificant. Not enough for it to play a substantial role in our biochemical evolution, which is I think the cogent point. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v234/n5325/abs/234132a0.html

In any case, this is all very interesting and I’d like to consult some experts on this subject.

Also, soap, are you saying the company should just tell the beekeepers “Tough luck”?

it is not honey. The only folks calling it so are news writers, and they are wrong.