Originally Posted By: Reddy45
It's oil. The stuff sat underground for millions of years and now we use it like the stuff is fresh batch.
True... oil sat underground so long its radioactivity has decay to a point where the US
Government has ruled that liquor must test radioactive to be legal... confused read on...
Quote Dr.Muller
Liquor and wine in the United States must be radioactive to be
legal. When tested, drinking alcohol is required to have at least 400
radioactive decays per minute for each 750 milliliters.
The U.S. government has decided that "alcohol for human consumption
must be made from "natural" materials, such as grains, grapes, or
fruit. That regulation rules out alcohol made from petroleum. Such
alcohol is chemically identical to natural alcohol and just as
safe-there's no difference in taste-so why this rule? The reasons have
to do with history-keeping alcohol more expensive (a goal of the
anti-alcohol lobby) and minimizing competition (a goal of the liquor
lobby). If there's no chemical difference, how can we tell natural
alcohol apart from alcohol made from petroleum? The U.S. Bureau of
Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, charged with enforcing the
natural-alcohol rule, has only one reliable test: check for
radioactivity. Natural alcohol gets its carbon from plants; the plants
got the carbon from atmospheric carbon dioxide. As explained on page
10, atmospheric carbon dioxide is radioactive because of the continued
bombardment of cosmic rays-particles coming from space-that collide
with nitrogen molecules and turn it into C-14, radiocarbon. Only one
atom in a trillion carbons in the atmosphere is radiocarbon, but
that's enough to be detectable. (I invented what is currently the most
sensitive way to detect C-14, called "accelerator mass spectrometry.")
Petroleum was also made from atmospheric carbon, but it was buried
hundreds of millions of years ago, isolated from the radioactive
atmosphere. Radiocarbon has a half-life of about 5,700 years, and
after 100 million years, there is nary an atom of C-14 left. So lack
of radioactivity in alcohol is a dead giveaway that it's made from
petroleum and not "natural" materials. True, a bootlegger could get
some C-14 and add it to illegal liquor. But that's beyond the skill
set of most bootleggers