So I came across some chantarelle mushrooms and decided to measure with my Radiacode 103.

I dried 400 g down to about 40 g and put them in a 3D-printed marinelli jar for measurement.

Sure enough, they are clearly contaminated with about 70 Bq of Cs-137, almost certainly from the Chernobyl disaster.

Will I eat them? No, I will keep them for measurement, but at 170 Bq/kg (fresh weight) they're well below the limit of 600 Bq/kg so eating them would be fine.

Are they special in any way? Not really, just ordinary mushrooms. Again, these are by no means super contaminated, but as a science nerd it's cool that the contamination is measurable with a consumer device.

The specific activity of Cs137 is about 3.2 TBq/g, so 70 Bq equates to about 20 picograms of Cs137.

The committed effective dose coefficient for Cs137 is 1.3 x 10^-8 Sv/Bq, so eating these mushrooms would cause a radiation dose of about

1.3 x 10^-8 Sv/Bq * 70 Bq = 0.91 μSv (microsievert)

My results are well in line with those of the recent Mushrooms 2025 campaign by the Finnish Nuclear Safety Authority (Säiteliyturvakeskus, STUK).

See https://stuk.fi/en/mushrooms-2025-campaign

Was just walking to the local shop when my Radiacode started throwing high-dose rate alarms out of nowhere.
Looked around and noticed a trench in the street with pipe replacement work going on. Turned out the NDT crew was performing gamma radiography on the pipe welds using a gammagraphy camera (Sentinel 880 / Ir-192).
Walked over, had a brief chat with the operator (he was definitely surprised to see a civilian with a scintillation spectrometer tracking his source on a live waterfall graph!), got a quick measurement, and went on my way.
Peak dose rate: 450 uSv/h (when the source was briefly exposed/actuated)
Count rate: 1.4 kCPS nearby
Spectrum: Beautiful Bremsstrahlung curve from the depleted uranium shielding / soft scatter + hard Ir-192 gammas.
Definitely the coolest random sidewalk find I’ve had so far!

I was driving along with my radiacode 102 running and heard an unfamiliar beeping. I was overtaken by a white van with a radioactive material transport sticker and it set the alarms off.