Quote:
Originally Posted by Flyndaran
Walking through an area is a lot easier than living in it. There are nuclear test sites from decades ago that are not safe for people to inhabit now or for the foreseeable future.
Plants take in the radioactives, so farming there would involve ingesting concentrated doses.
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Yes and no. Usually what is considered unsafe by modern standards is a very conservative estimate (and for very good reason!), in a post collapse setting that involved nuclear weapons those standards might need to be revised upwards several times. There are still people who live within the exclusion zones of Chernobyle and Fukashima as an example though the jury is still out on long term health effects. Even then however I expect there would be area's too hot for anyone to inhabit long term without significant work. The more dangerous the area the more lucrative it'd have to be to justify the effort needed.
Also most radioactive particulate tend to not penetrate very far into the topsoil thus farming methods that minimize disruption to the first few inches can significantly reduce the overall accumulation. You can also deliberately exploit this bio-accumulation by using non-fodder crops with a high uptake affinity to help remove the radioactive materials from the soil and concentrate it within the plant structure. This is a real suggestion for helping clean up area's in Chernobyle using Ethanol producing crops where the bulk of the radioactive materials would be left concentrated in the the solid crop residue after processing.