Fish Eaters Threatened by Fukushima Radiation

Evidence has emerged that the impacts of the disaster on the Pacific Ocean are worse than expected.

Since a tsunami and earthquake destroyed the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant last March, radioactive cesium has consistently been found in 60 to 80 per cent of Japanese fishing catches each month, as tested by Japan's Fisheries Agency.

Overall, one in five of the 1,100 catches tested in November exceeded the new ceiling of 100 becquerels per kilogram. (Canada's ceiling for radiation in food is much higher: 1,000 becquerels per kilogram.)

"I would probably be hesitant to eat a lot of those fish," said Nicholas Fisher, a marine sciences professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Cesium was especially prevalent in certain of the species:

• 73 per cent of mackerel tested

• 91 per cent of the halibut

• 92 per cent of the sardines

• 93 per cent of the tuna and eel

• 94 per cent of the cod and anchovies

• 100 per cent of the carp, seaweed, shark and monkfish

Some of the fish were caught in Japanese coastal waters. Other catches were made hundreds of kilometres away in the open ocean.

There, the fish also can be caught by fishers from dozens of other nations who fish in the waters of the Pacific.

Yet, Japan is the only country that appears to be systematically testing fish for radiation and publicly reporting the results. The Vancouver Sun (reproduced on ReaderSupportedNews)

Beyond Nuclear note: Although this story is about seafood concerns in Canada, it is worth noting that the US allowable contamination level is greater that both Japan and Canada, and that the US imports seafood and other foodstuffs from Japan.  The Food and Drug Adminstration (FDA) of the United States is allowing a contamination level of 1200 Bq/kg of just Cesium 134 and Cesium 137 to be present in food imports from Japan that are not banned outright. Foods banned outright seem mainly limited to only select items grown in the localized areas of contamination within Japan.

Grasshoppers in Japan contaminated with high cesium amounts

With a Geiger counter in his pocket, Mr. Fugo, along with two students, in October went to Iitate, a village located over 30 kilometers away from the nuclear plant and where hot spots of high radiation have been discovered. There they collected about 500 grasshoppers, a cousin of the locust which was in short supply in the area because local rice fields were barren. The radiation in the air varied from 2.5 microsieverts to a little over 3 microsieverts per hour at the time.

About 4,000 becquerels of radioactive cesium-134 and cesium-137 was detected in the grasshoppers, all 500 weighing a cumulative one kilogram. The levels far exceed Japan’s regulatory limit of 500 becquerels per kilogram.  Wall Street Journal

"Decontamination" of Fukushima zones can destroy ecosystems and habitat

Efforts are underway to "decontaminate" areas close to the destroyed Fukushima reactors, but the removal of what now amounts to radioactive waste can also exacerbate the problem Japanese authorities are trying to fix. Japan has decided to attempt a cleanup, rather than create a no-go zone, like Chernobyl, hoping to return residents to the area. But, aside from the problem of where to put all the removed soil, leaves and plants, the process can also destroy habitat and ecosystems. According to a detailed article in The Guardian, the "efforts will create new environmental problems in direct proportion to their success in remediating the radioactive contamination," according to writer Winifred Bird of Yale Environment 360. An excerpt:

"Officials involved with the cleanup are well aware of the drawbacks to these approaches: huge amounts of radioactive waste that no one wants to store long-term; immense investments of money, labor, and time; damage to wildlife habitat and soil fertility; increased erosion on scraped-bare hillsides; and intrusion by people and machinery into every area scheduled for remediation.

"You remove leaf litter from the forest floor and radiation levels fall," said Shinichi Nakayama, a nuclear engineer at the JAEA who is overseeing the 19 decontamination pilot projects planned or underway. "You take away the deeper layers and they fall more. But you take it all away and the ecosystem is destroyed. Water retention goes down and flooding can occur."" Read the full article.

"Government envisioned Tokyo evacuation in worst-case scenario"

As reported by the Asahi Shimbun, the administration of Prime Minister Kan ordered plans be drawn up for a worst-case scenario at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear catastrophe site. If one or more reactors had exploded, and released large amounts of hazardous radioactivity, the site would have had to have been abandoned, for the safety of the workers. In that case, the storage pool for high-level radioactive waste at Unit 4 would have boiled dry, and its contents caught fire.

The worst-case scenario plan, drawn up by Shunsuke Kondo, chairman of the Japan Atomic Energy Commission, would have called for the mandatory evacuation of a 170-kilometer (105-mile) radius, and the voluntary evacuation from the 170-km to 250-km zone (155-mi). This later radius would have included the Tokyo metropolitan area, itself home to more than 13 million people.

Fukushima further "explodes the myth" of "nuclear renaissance"

In a new report entitled "Nuclear Safety and Nuclear Economics: Historically, Accidents Dim the Prospects for Nuclear Reactor Construction; Fukushima Will Have a Major Impact," Dr. Mark Cooper of the Vermont Law School's Institute for Energy and the Environment compares the cost increases for new reactor construction -- due to increased nuclear safety regulation in the aftermath of the 1979 Three Mile Island meltdown -- to escalating costs that can be expected after the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe. Cooper points out, however, the new reactor construction costs were already skyrocketing before the TMI and Fukushima meltdowns -- but the accidents accelerated the cost increases dramatically.

He concludes: "From a big picture perspective, Fukushima has had and is likely to continue to have an electrifying impact because it combines the most powerful message from TMI on cost escalation with the most powerful message from Chernobyl on the risk of nuclear reactors in a nation where it was not supposed to happen. And, it has taken place in an environment where information and images flow instantaneously around the world, so the public sees the drama and trauma of losing control of a nuclear reaction in real time."