SEVEN YEARS AFTER: Fukushima fish sold overseas for first time since nuclear disaster

As reported by KAZUMASA SUGIMURA in the Asahi Shimbun.

The article reports:

Seafood from the prefecture has since then only been permitted to be shipped after having its safety confirmed through radiation level checks.

Prefectural officials said no seafood had been found to show radiation levels higher than the national standards for almost three years.

However, no details re: the exact methodology of "radiation level checks" is provided by the article.

Testing food for radioactive contamination requires sophisticated methodology. Simply passing a hand held radiation detector over fish, for example, could easily miss contamination that is present, incorporated into the fish flesh.

Internal exposure to ionizing radiation carries even more hazard than external exposure. This is especially true if the hazardous radionuclides then incorporate themselves into human physiology, after the person eats contaminated food.

As Dr. Rosalie Bertell warned decades ago, bio-accumulation (also known as bio-magnification, and bio-concentration) of radioactive contamination up the food chain is a major concern, as in the aftermath of a nuclear power plant catastrophe like at Fukushima. Humans are at the top of the food chain, at risk of receiving concentrated hazardous radioactivity doses, as by eating contaminated seafood.

The fishing cooperatives of the area, however, have led the effort to prevent Tokyo Electric from dumping around a million tons of radioactive waste water, severely contaminated with tritium, into the ocean -- as a supposed "dilution" or disposal method. As Michael Keegan of Coalition for a Nuclear-Free Great Lakes put it at an anti-nuclear gathering in Chicago in June 2010, "Dilution as a solution for radioactive pollution is a delusion!"