Radioactive Shrimp? FDA Warns Walmart Customers to Avoid Certain Seafood

Radioactive Shrimp? FDA Warns Walmart Customers to Avoid Certain Seafood

The weirdness of 2025 continues at an exponential pace.

Legal Insurrection readers may recall that a radioactive wasp nest was recently detected in an abandoned South Carolina nuclear material processing site active in the Cold War era.

Then, four reactors at France’s Gravelines nuclear power plant (one of the most extensive nuclear facilities in Europe) were temporarily shut down after a massive swarm of jellyfish clogged the plant’s critical water intake systems.

Now, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued a warning about Great Value brand raw frozen shrimp sold at Walmart due to possible contamination with Cesium-137, a radioactive isotope.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection alerted the FDA about possible Cesium-137, or Cs-137, detected in shipping containers at four U.S. ports, the FDA said Tuesday in a press release. Testing on frozen shrimp from the distributor, Indonesia’s BMS Foods, also tested positive, the FDA said.

However, no shrimp that has tested positive for Cesium-137 has entered the U.S. food supply, according to the FDA.

The FDA is still recommending a recall on all products from BMS Foods that were shipped after the company’s shipping containers tested positive for Cesium-137, even though the products themselves have not tested positive.

I did not have Walmart ‘radioactive shrimp’ on my 2025 bingo card-
Did you? pic.twitter.com/Fdq14LGRIb

— GrrrGraphics-Ben Garrison 🤠 Cartoons 🇺🇸 (@GrrrGraphics) August 19, 2025

No, I did not.

The following products have been recalled:

• Great Value brand frozen raw shrimp, lot code: 8005540-1, best by date: March 15, 2027
• Great Value brand frozen raw shrimp, lot code: 8005538-1, best by date: March 15, 2027
• Great Value brand frozen raw shrimp, lot code: 8005539-1, best by date: March 15, 2027

Products from the Indonesian firm responsible for packaging the materials in radioactively contaminated containers will no longer be allowed to ship products to the country until they can meet federal conditions.

The frozen shrimp product, per the FDA’s press release, appears to have been “prepared, packed, or held under insanitary conditions whereby it may have become contaminated with Cs-137 and may pose a safety concern.”

For customers who’ve recently purchased any of the affected frozen shrimp products as described above, the FDA recommends that they be thrown out immediately.

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“Distributors and retailers should dispose of this product and should not sell or serve this product,” the FDA warned.

The FDA has also added Indonesia’s BMS Foods to a new import alert for chemical contamination. Products from the firm will no longer enter the U.S. until they’ve “resolved the conditions that gave rise to the appearance of the violation.”

The FDA has taken this step out of an abundance of caution, as the low levels of Cs-137 actually detected are not anticipated to be harmful. Walmart has removed the product and will participate in the investigation.

The amount of Cs-137 the FDA detected is below its “levels of concern” for imported foods, it said. Even so, the agency said that the recall attempts to address concerns related to “longer term, repeated low dose exposure.”

The FDA recommended that anyone who has bought or who sells the products throw them out. Walmart similarly advised customers with the products in their possession to discard them. The company confirmed to TIME that it immediately recalled the products from impacted stores and said customers who had already purchased them could visit any Walmart store for a full refund.

“The health and safety of our customers is always a top priority,” a Walmart spokesperson said in a statement. “We have issued a sales restriction and removed this product from our impacted stores. We are working with the supplier to investigate.”

…People are often exposed to small quantities of Cs-137 due to the isotope remaining in the environment following nuclear weapons testing in the mid-20th century. Cs-137 can last in soil for years, which means that it often ends up in the food cycle and in foods that people ingest. Typically this is at extremely low levels that are not harmful to people—though as the FDA emphasized in its statement, even low levels of Cs-137 radiation can eventually build up and become harmful.

Image by perplexity.ai

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