Although there's still roughly month to go, 2025 has produced so many bizarre headlines that strange news can be quickly forgotten.
For example, on Aug. 18, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued an urgent notice concerning radioactive shrimp potentially contaminated with cesium 137.
Recently, Bloomberg revisited that incident, worryingly finding more questions than answers.
What's happening?
The cesium 137 problem was initially discovered by port inspectors in Los Angeles.
Containers of goods, including shrimp and sneakers, had started "emitting faint traces of man-made radiation." Meanwhile, a "single container" of Adidas-branded sneakers headed for Swiss markets tripped radar detectors in Rotterdam, yielding "faint traces" of the same radiation.
In the U.S., the news sparked post-recall memes -- and while the story was buried amid a busy news cycle, investigators worked to determine exactly what caused it.
What they discovered was a public health and environmental disaster-in-progress, identifying a chain reaction of potentially deadly contamination with only vague leads as to how it originated and, in turn, how to ensure the risk had been eliminated.
Authorities traced the cesium 137 release to a small scrap-metal smelter at an industrial park outside Indonesia's capital, Jakarta; Bloomberg noted it was "unclear" whether the release occurred "by accident or deliberately."
In the affected area, there were at least 20 manufacturers, including sneaker factories for Nike and Adidas, and seafood exporters. Officials around the world enhanced screening, and a shipment of contaminated Indonesian cloves arrived at the Port of Long Beach, California.
That sent investigators to farmland in southern Sumatra, nearly 50 miles from the park, where they were perplexed to discover cesium 137 levels even higher than those on the shrimp, "especially when investigators dug into the soil."
Bloomberg indicated that while no connection between these incidents and a separate instance of radioactive zinc being intercepted had been established, the "detection of man-made Cesium-137 at different locations in such quick succession is highly unusual."
Why is this concerning?
"This case has tarnished our country's reputation internationally. If America hadn't detected it, we wouldn't have known," Evita Nursanty, an Indonesian lawmaker, said at a parliamentary meeting this month, per Bloomberg.
The still largely unexplained cesium 137 incident had broad implications across several areas: the global supply chain, food safety, waste handling, and the dangers of e-waste.
While cesium 137 contamination is rare, particularly at this scale, Bloomberg cited an incident in 1998 in Spain. According to the Nuclear Threat Initiative, it was emblematic of a larger problem known as "orphan sources."
The Environmental Protection Agency describes orphan sources loosely as "unwanted radioactive material," dangerous sealed sources of radioactive contamination that have been abandoned, lost, or improperly discarded.
During the Acerinox incident in 1998, an orphan source was inadvertently melted, triggering radiation alarms in France, Germany, Italy, and Switzerland, underscoring the disparity between the scale of a small misstep and its global reach.
What's being done about it?
In Indonesia, officials are still scrambling to properly handle "1,000 tons and counting" of contaminated materials from the incident.
In the aftermath, the incident in Spain cost $26 million to remediate, or $52.2 million in today's dollars.
Nursanty raised the specter of impending costs during the November meeting.
"My question is, who is responsible for the cost of decontamination being carried out now?" she asked, per Bloomberg.
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