Thread: Fukushima Radiation Scare Stories Are Going Viral. Are They Real Or FAKE?

Fukushima radiation found 400 miles west of Newport

Tracy Loew, Statesman Journal6:22 p.m. PST December 10, 2014


(Photo: ANNA REED / Statesman Journal)

On the last Sunday in November, Terry Waldron waded into the surf at Nye Beach in Newport and filled a plastic bucket from the frigid Pacific Ocean.

The salty water now sits in a laboratory across the country, at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, awaiting testing on highly sensitive equipment.

Waldron is part of a corps of West Coast citizen scientists sampling ocean water near their homes for traces of radiation from the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant on the other side of the Pacific.

New data from Woods Hole shows very low levels of Fukushima radiation about 400 miles due west of Newport, as well as at other offshore sites along the West Coast.

At current levels, the radiation is not expected to harm humans or the environment.

But in the absence of federal monitoring, citizens such as Waldron have taken it upon themselves to test for its arrival on beaches.

"My husband surfs a lot. He lived in Newport for 12 years before we met," Waldron said. "He has cancer, and we eat a lot of fish. I have a lot of reasons to want to conduct a test like this."

RELATED: Fukushima radiation identified off northern California

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Terry Waldron collects sea water samples to be tested as part of a citizen-science Fukushima radiation monitoring project at Nye Beach in Newport, Ore., on Sunday, Nov. 30, 2014.(Photo: ANNA REED / Statesman Journal)

Waldron's sampling site is the fourth in Oregon and joins more than three dozen from the Gulf of Alaska to San Diego.

Woods Hole chemical oceanographer Ken Buesseler runs the project, called Our Radioactive Ocean, from his lab in Massachusetts.

So far citizen science tests haven't found Fukushima radiation on shores, he said.

But Buesseler also joined forces with the captain of a marine research vessel to take offshore samples.

In October, he reported that a sample taken about 745 miles west of Vancouver, B.C., tested positive for Cesium 134, the so-called "fingerprint" of Fukushima because it could only have come from the plant.

STATESMANJOURNAL TEPCO to U.S. West Coast: Approaching cesium 'raises no concern'

It also showed higher-than-background levels of Cesium 137, another Fukushima isotope that already is present in the world's oceans from nuclear testing in the 1950s and 1960s.

Buy PhotoTerry
Waldron and her husband collect sea water samples to be tested as part of a citizen-science Fukushima radiation monitoring project at Nye Beach in Newport, Ore., on Sunday, Nov. 30, 2014.(Photo: ANNA REED / Statesman Journal)

Last month, as more of those samples were processed, Buesseler reported that Fukushima radiation had been identified in 10 offshore samples, including one 100 miles off the coast of Eureka, Calif.

Now, further results show four positive samples off Oregon's shores, with the closest off Newport.

The samples were taken Aug. 4 at depths between 15 and 150 meters.

Further samples from the research cruise await processing.

Buesseler now is teaming up with scientists at the University of Victoria, Canada, on a similar project called InFORM, for Integrated Fukushima Ocean Radionuclide Monitoring.

It includes about a dozen sites along the British Columbia coast where volunteer citizens are regularly collecting water and seafood samples for analysis.

tloew@statesmanjournal.com, (503) 399-6779 or follow at Twitter.com/SJWatchdog

http://www.statesmanjournal.com/stor...-ore/20223771/

Gary Griggs, Our Ocean Backyard: Tracking Fukushima radiation across the Pacific

By Gary Griggs, Our Ocean Backyard
POSTED: 12/26/14, 4:13 PM PST |

Radiation from the meltdown of the three reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant in March 2011 quickly entered the offshore ocean.

The radiation was detected in the water immediately. Several species of fish caught offshore in 2011 and 2012 had radioactive cesium levels that exceeded Japan’s seafood consumption levels, but overall concentrations have dropped since the fall of 2011.

The meltdown and radiation release generated an immediate concern in the minds of at least some, perhaps many, Californians. Are fish caught offshore safe to eat? When might our coastal waters likely be contaminated with radiation from Japan? These were common questions I heard nearly four years ago.

If you look at the way ocean currents circulate clockwise around the North Pacific, from Japan to our west coast, and combine that with a justified fear of radiation exposure from any source, these are perfectly logical reactions.

The Kuroshio (Japan) Current flows north from the equatorial region, skirts the edge of Japan, and then turns to the right to head across the Pacific toward North America.

The Kuroshio transitions quickly to the much slower North Pacific Current. Roughly 1,000 miles off the west coast the current splits, with one part turning left and heading into the Gulf of Alaska as the Alaska Current; the remainder turns right, and heads south and becomes the broad and diffuse California Current.

Anything picked up by the Kuroshio Current as it passes by Japan, whether tsunami debris, glass fishing floats, or radioactive contaminants, heads towards North America, but slowly, a little more than 5 miles every day on average.

At this speed, water moving from Japan in a straight path would take about three years or longer to get to the west coast.

Shortly after the Fukushima Daiichi meltdown and radiation release, oceanographers projected that it would likely take until 2014 until it reached the West Coast of North America.

The January 2014 Scientific American had an interesting article titled: “What You Should and Shouldn’t Worry About After the Fukushima Nuclear Meltdowns”, which provided some interesting perspective on Pacific Ocean radiation.

It turns out, somewhat surprisingly, that the nuclear bomb testing that went on in the Pacific from the 1940s to the 1980s, contributed hundreds of times more radioactivity to the oceans than Fukushima. There is also uranium dissolved naturally in seawater.

So Fukushima is not the largest contributor to radiation in the waters of the Pacific Ocean.

Although no U.S. federal agency has routinely monitored the offshore waters for radiation, scientists from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and Oregon State University have been analyzing samples intermittently since the March 11 disaster. On Nov. 10, 2014, Woods Hole announced that they had detected trace amounts of radioactivity that could be used to fingerprint Fukushima because of the presence of cesium-134. Before you get alarmed, keep reading.

Surface water samples were collected along a 2,000-mile long transect extending from Dutch Harbor, Alaska (in the Aleutian Islands) to Eureka in Northern California, and along the length of the California coast.

Cesium-134 was detected in 10 of the water samples analyzed along this transect, all but one of these were from the waters of the current heading towards the Gulf of Alaska. One sample off Southern Oregon did reveal the presence of cesium-134.

However, and read this carefully, while the cesium from Fukushima was detected with very sensitive instruments, the amount of radiation present (measured in some obscure units that 99.99 percent of us have probably never heard of Becquerels/cubic meter of seawater) is very low. The lead scientist from Woods Hole, Ken Buessler, has reported, “The levels offshore are still quite low. So by that I mean that they are a couple of these Becquerels per cubic meter, something that is about a thousand times less than a drinking water standard”.

He said while he is reluctant to “trivialize” any amount of radiation, he personally has no concerns about swimming, boating or eating fish from local waters. A radioecologist (someone studying radiation in organisms) at Oregon State University, Delvan Neville, who has tested albacore in the North Pacific for radiation, said that the cesium-134 levels reported, “are much less than the natural background radiation in seawater.”

He felt certain that the low levels of Fukushima-derived isotopes detected in the northeastern Pacific do not pose an environmental or human health radiological threat.

Gary Griggs is director of the Institute of Marine Sciences and Long Marine Laboratory at UC Santa Cruz. He can be reached at griggs@ucsc.edu. For past Ocean Backyard columns, visit http://seymourcenter.ucsc.edu/about-...kyard-archive/.

http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/env...ss-the-pacific

Radiation from Fukushima is reaching the West Coast — but you don’t need to freak out

By Chris Mooney December 29 at 3:36 PM

A worker walks past first storage tanks of radioactive contaminated water at tsunami-crippled Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. (EPA/Kimimasa Mayama)

The 2011 Fukushima Daiichi crisis was the worst nuclear disaster in decades, and people in Japan are still living with its consequences. One team of scientists estimated in 2012 that the radiation released from Fukushima's four reactors may ultimately claim 130 lives and cause 180 additional cases of cancer (in addition to the exposures suffered by workers on site). Radiation releases into the ocean near the Fukushima plant also led to fisheries closures and bans, and a tightening of acceptable limits for radiation in Japanese seafood.

Naturally, in light of all this, many Americans have been concerned -- sometimes overly so -- that radiation from Fukushima, traveling through the vast Pacific ocean, would eventually make its way to the waters off the West Coast of the United States and Canada. And according to a new scientific paper just out in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that has indeed happened.

The paper, by John N. Smith of Fisheries and Oceans Canada (a government agency) and several colleagues, is the "first systematic study...of the transport of the Fukushima marine radioactivity signal to the eastern North Pacific," and concludes that radiation reached the continental shelf of Canada by June of last year, and has increased somewhat since.

But-- and here's the good news -- the levels of radiation are very low, well below levels that public health authorities cite as grounds for concern. The radiation "does not represent a threat to human health or the environment," reports the paper.

The new study is not the first to reach that conclusion. "We came up with something like 500 to 1000 times less of a dose, the hazard of the radiation of swimming in the Pacific, as a dental X Ray," says senior scientist Ken Buesseler of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, who was not involved in the current study. Buesseler heads a crowd-funded, citizen research project, Our Radioactive Oceans, which first reported the presence of small quantities of Fukushima radiation in a sample taken in August 2014 100 miles off the coast of Eureka, Calif. The radiation was at low levels, similar to that reported in the current research.

In fact, what's truly amazing about the work is that scientists are able to actually measure these very low levels of radiation at all -- as well as to chemically fingerprint them and thereby prove that certain radioisotopes of the chemical element Cesium, which arise as a by-product of nuclear fission, actually arrived off of North American waters after traveling all the way from Fukushima.

In the current paper, the researchers accomplished this by taking a series of measurements, from 2011-2014, on ocean vessels which traveled 1,500 kilometers out from Canadian coastal waters into the Pacific. Water samples were taken to look for two radioisotopes, Cesium-134 and Cesium-137, both of which were released as part of the radioactivity from Fukushima.

Cesium-134 has a two-year half-life (meaning half of it will have decayed within 2 years), whereas Cesium-137 has a 30 year half life. What that means is that the presence of Cesium-134 allows scientists to conclusively separate out Fukushima-generated radiation from the other major human source of radiation in the Pacific -- nuclear weapons testing, which happened decades ago (there would be no more Cesium-134 detectable from this source). This simple fact allows for "unequivocal" detection of radiation originating from Fukushima, even thousands of miles away, noted the new study.

In light of this, the paper found that radiation from Fukushima was definitely detectable in waters of the Canadian continental shelf by June 2013, and had apparently increased somewhat by February of 2014. However, the levels of radiation are quite low. For nuclear power nerds, the Fukushima radiation levels were under 1 Becquerel per cubic meter of ocean water, where a Becquerel refers to one nuclear decay per second and a cubic meter of ocean is 1000 liters (or 260 gallons).

"A Becquerel per cubic meter is not a lot of radioactivity," says Stony Brook University's Nicholas Fisher, another researcher who has published on Fukushima radioactivity's contamination of the oceans, but was not involved in the current study. For reference, the background levels of Cesium-137 in many parts of the world ocean is actually higher than that:


Credit: Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

Indeed, the number underscores just how much the Fukushima radiation has been diluted and dispersed in its three-year journey across the Pacific. In the waters right off the Fukushima plant, just after the accident, radiation levels were 50 million Becquerels per cubic meter -- extremely dangerous -- explains Woods Hole's Ken Buesseler. A few months later, levels were in the low thousands, he adds -- still worrisome if you are consuming seafood.

But now that the radiation has reached the waters of the West Coast, levels of 1 or 2 Becquerels per cubic meter are pretty tiny and dilute. "It’s tens of millions of degrees on the sun, versus the temperature on the Earth," says Buesseler. "So that’s the difference in having 1 or 2 of these Becquerels, versus what was off Japan."

The radiation levels on the West Coast from Fukushima may still grow a tad higher, and actually reach the beaches. But they are not expected to approach levels that would worry public health authorities or scientists, who are constantly mindful of the fact that there is radiation all around us.

"Most of the radioactivity in the oceans is natural radioactivity, and it has nothing to do with nuclear power plants or atomic weapons or anything like that," explains Stony Brook's Nicholas Fisher,. "Something on the order of 99 percent of all the radioactivity in the oceans is natural."

Here's a helpful figure from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution showing as much:


Credit: Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

Nonetheless, there has long been public concern about risks from low level radiation, which is understandable in light of the fact that you may be exposed and yet never know it. And there has often been overblown concern about radiation from Fukushima in particular, including the circulation of numerous scary (and often misleading) images purporting to show radiation flowing across the Pacific.

Scientists actually studying the matter have a very different outlook on the Fukushima radiation and its long range travels.

"My take home is always, don’t trivialize it or dismiss it, but also don’t exaggerate what the effects might be," says Woods Hole's Ken Buesseler. "Some people are adamantly anti-nuclear, and that’s fine, but don’t scare people from swimming in the Pacific."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...-to-freak-out/

Fukushima radiation: US West Coast will likely see peak by end of 2015

At its peak, levels of radioactivity from cesium-137 will still fall far below levels that the US and Canadian governments deem safe for drinking water, according to a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

By Pete Spotts, Staff writer DECEMBER 29, 2014

• Shizuo Kambayashi/Reuters/FileView Caption

Scientists keeping tabs on the eastward voyage of radioactive byproducts from the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear-power-station disaster in Japan suggest that radioactivity from the byproducts should peak off the US and Canadian coasts by the end of next year. After that, they are expected to begin a gradual decline to background levels.

The chief concern: Radioactivity from cesium-137, the longest-lived of two forms of cesium released in the disaster, which ocean surface currents have carried east. At its peak, levels of radioactivity from cesium-137 will still fall far below levels that the US and Canadian governments deem safe for drinking water, according to data in a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

The nuclear power station lost emergency power when it was hit by a tsunami triggered by a magnitude 9 earthquake offshore on March 11, 2011. As a result, the plant couldn't keep reactors cool or spent-fuel pools filled. Three of four reactors partially melted, while hydrogen explosions wracked buildings containing the reactors. The event released significant amounts of radiation, including leaks of radioactive water to the ocean.

Recommended: Think you know Japan? Take our quiz to find out.

Combined with background levels of cesium-137 radiation that remain from above-ground nuclear-weapons tests conducted in the 1950s and '60s, the additional cesium-137 from Fukushima is projected to push the isotope's watery radiation levels back up to where they were in the 1980s, the study indicates. At that time, radiation from cesium-137 in fish tissue was so low that people were far more concerned about mercury in tuna than cesium.


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The PNAS study builds on research described at an ocean-sciences meeting in Hawaii last February. The work relied on data gathered between 2011 and 2013 from a string of 26 sampling sites that began at the Juan de Fuca Strait and stretched westward for more than 1,000 miles.

The team looked for cesium-134 to herald the arrival of Fukushima's cesium-137. Nuclear reactors produce both, but cesium-134 loses half its radioactivity every two years. Cesium-137, with its 30-year half life, is the more worrisome of the two forms isotopes. If researchers detected only cesium-137, they knew they were looking at the post-nuclear-testing
background. If they saw both forms of cesium at the same time, they knew Fukushima's cesium-137 had arrived and could estimate its contribution beyond background cesium radiation levels.

Cesium-137 from Fukushima reached the western end of the sampling string in 2012, and by June 2013 had reached sampling sites on the continental shelf, noted John Smith, a chemical oceanographer at the Bedford Institute of Oceanography in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, at the time.

The new study includes additional data taken in February 2014, data that the team finished processing during the summer, writes Dr. Smith in an e-mail.

"The conclusions haven't changed," he writes, referring to projections that even at its peak, radiation from cesium-137 should remain far below levels that are deemed a threat to human health or to the environment.

The background level runs about 1 Becquerel – the decay of one cesium-137 nucleus each second – per cubic meter of water. At its peak, the radiation level is expected to reach about 3 to 5 Becquerels per cubic meter of water. By contrast, Canada's drinking-water standard for cesium-137 is 10,000 Becquerels per cubic meter.

If the added data haven't altered the team's basic conclusion, they have helped sift among competing projections offered by other research teams. In one projection, cesium-137 levels were slated to begin rising in late 2014 with a peak around 2017. The other had an earlier onset to the increase, with the peak coming in late 2015.

Data available last February were too sparse to provide a reality check on the models. With the additional data, however, the second projection seems the most likely, providing "greater certainty in future projections of the Fukushima radioactivity signal in the eastern North Pacific Ocean," Smith writes.

Meanwhile, Fukushima's cesium-137 also has appeared off the northern California coast, Ken Buesseler, an oceanographer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, reported in early November.

Dr. Buesseler and colleagues have enlisted citizen scientists to gather water samples for analysis in a monitoring project that uses crowd-sourced funding to underwrite the effort.

The sample was collected in August about 100 miles west of Eureka. It contained cesium-134, whose radiation was recorded at 2 Becquerels per cubic meter of water, more than 1,000 times less than the US Environmental Protections Agency's maximum level for drinking water.

http://www.csmonitor.com/Environment...by-end-of-2015

Tests on Fukushima Rice Finally Show Safe Results

• by Lizabeth Paulat
• January 8, 2015 10:00 am

It has taken three years, but rice growing near the Fukushima nuclear plant has now tested safely for consumption. The Fukushima disaster in 2011 caused international concern over food safety and water contamination when a tsunami pounded into the nuclear facility and unleashed toxic radiation.

For reference, the government’s limit on safe amounts of radiation is 100 becquerels per kilogram. The areas affected by the disaster were the farming communities of Fukushima, Iwate, Tochigi, Gunma, Chiba, Miyagi and Ibaraki.

During the period after the disaster, items like bamboo shoots, shiitake mushrooms, beef and rye were all testing far outside of the accepted range. Mushrooms ranged from 150-350 becquerels, while beef was around 772 becquerels per kilogram.

The danger of exporting food from a nuclear disaster site set off long range economic problems for Japan’s farmers and fears from consumers all over the world. In Japan, 44% of people said they’d avoid radioactive foods, with 22% preferring stricter government control. Citizen fears are not unfounded.

In response to the nuclear disaster, Japan actually raised its limits of acceptable radiation exposure to 20x higher than what’s considered safe in the United States. Many felt this was Japan’s way of mitigating a P.R. crisis.

Yet across the Pacific, the West Coast of the United States also worried about how the spread of radioactivity might impact their fish and agriculture. Such fears prompted residents in California to pass measures to improve the testing of marine life off their shores.

Although scientists tried to calm fears, telling residents that the levels of radioactivity in water that reached the West Coast would be far below international acceptable standards, it did little to pacify concerns.

So it is no doubt that in this atmosphere of fear and apprehension, farmers and Japanese officials are breathing easier with the study results. More than 360,000 tons of rice were tested in the study. However, it seems the evidence has yet to be corroborated by outside sources, and that’s still causing some hesitation. Many around the world wanted the UN to oversee or take over clean up in Fukushima, citing distrust of the government.

This was also true for the Koreans. Reports of groundwater seepage from the nuclear facility prompted South Korea to ban imports from the region in 2013. Although the Korean scientists are expected to come back again within the month and consider lifting the ban, many still harbor concerns over importing the rice.

It’s a difficult challenge for farmers, who have undoubtedly suffered some of the largest economic losses in the disaster. Many toiled on organic farms that have been ravaged by nuclear waste. One farmer, Toraaki Ogata, told the North Queensland Resister, “All I can do is pray there will be no radiation…It’s not our fault at all, but the land of our ancestors has been defiled.”

While the Japanese government assigned about $1.3 billion for decontamination methods in these zones, it has been a slow moving process to get clean rice. However, it is one that Tsuneaki Oonami claims has been done right. Oonami, a Fukushima official, told reporters that, “The fact that the amount of rice that does not pass our checks has steadily reduced in the last three years indicates that we’re taking the right steps.” And for the sake of the farmers, the environment and international trade, this has been welcome news.

Read more: http://www.care2.com/causes/tests-on...#ixzz3OHyVsl5T

DFO monitors radiation from 2011 Fukushima nuclear reactor release

• by J.R. Rardon - Campbell River Mirror
  
• posted Feb 10, 2015 at 2:00 PM

The presence of radiation in West Coast waters from the 2011 Fukushima nuclear reactor release is expected to peak in 2015-16, yet remain far below a level that poses health risks to humans or animals.

A paper published by Fisheries and Oceans Canada scientist Dr. John Smith in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in December, 2014, details the arrival and concentration of radioactive isotopes Cs-134 and Cs-137 from Fukushima Daichi-1 in the North Pacific Ocean.

The reactor was damaged in the magnitude 9.0 earthquake and resulting tsunami that struck off the coast of Japan in March, 2011.

That resulted in the release of a radioactive plume from Fukushima Daichi-1 into the atmosphere and water of the North Pacific Ocean.

In the first three years following the incident, levels of Cesium 137 have risen to two becquerels per cubic metre of water from normal background readings of one becquerel per cubic metre, Smith wrote.

Those levels are projected to peak at approximately five becquerels in the coming year before gradually returning to background levels.

To put that figure in perspective, DFO notes, Canada’s standard for Cesium-137 in drinking water is 10,000 becquerels per cubic metre.

Following the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, DFO established an ocean monitoring program to validate ocean circulation models and trace the arrival of Fukushima radioactivity. That system has grown to include 80 monitoring stations in the Strait of Georgia and Juan de Fuca.

The monitoring system tests not only for the presence of radiation, but for a variety of physical, chemical and biological properties of the water at varying depths.

“One of the reasons that we undertake this survey, is that we’re interested in understanding the oceanography of the region, and by monitoring the ocean we can identify changes that are occurring, which may be indicators of the ecosystem being at risk,” said Peter Chandler, a physical oceanographer.

http://www.campbellrivermirror.com/news/291445941.html

Fukushima radiation helps researchers study ocean currents

Sanden Totten

March 11, 05:30 AMA map of ocean currents from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. NOAA





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It's been four years since an earthquake and tsunami combo caused a nuclear meltdown in Japan, resulting in a significant amount of radioactive material leaking into the Pacific Ocean.

Since then, the isotopes from the Fukushima plant have slowly travelled toward North America.

Scientists say none of the tainted water has washed up on West Coast shores yet, and when it does, they expect concentrations of nuclear material to be well below dangerous levels.

Still, as this material moves through the ocean, scientists have been tracking it to learn more about how ocean currents work.

Radioactive elements such as the cesium and iodine associated with Fukushima make for excellent tracers, said Ken Buesseler with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

That's because these materials first entered the ocean on a specific date and so their progress can be monitored from then on.

Projected levels of cesium-137 from Fukushima Dai-ichi, 2011-2021 from Woods Hole Oceanographic Inst. onVimeo.

So far, these elements have shown that water from Asia travels more slowly to North America than many computer models predicted.

Buesseler also noted that the leading models had significantly different predictions for when the tainted material should reach North America.

This new data will help researchers tweak the models to better understand how material moves through the Pacific.

"We simply would want to know better... when a contaminant might show up from any source in the ocean," Buesseler said.

These isotopes could also help researchers better understand a phenomenon called upwelling. This occurs when surface water off shore mixes with deeper ocean water.

By tracing the isotopes as they go through this process researchers will be able to see how upwelling affects when distant water reaches the shore.

"There are some big questions we can address by looking at these relatively small amounts of Fukushima isotopes on our coastline," he said.

Studying isotopes in the ocean is not a new technique. Scientists used material released after nuclear weapons tests in the '50s and '60s to do early work on ocean currents.

Buesseler himself studied material released during the Chernobyl disaster of the 1980s to learn more about the water patters of the Black Sea.

Later this year he plans to travel from Hawaii to Alaska in a research vessel to sample water in hopes of learning more.

http://www.scpr.org/news/2015/03/11/...s-study-ocean/