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This is the second time radiation from Japan has shown up on our shores. In March, we reported:A bit of cesium-134 — a telltale kind of radiation particle expected from Japan’s 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster — has been detected in a soil sample taken from the beach at Kilby Provincial Park up the Fraser River Valley in British Columbia, said Krzysztof Starosta, an associate professor of chemistry at Simon Fraser University.
The sample was collected by a marine biologist studying spawning salmon at that point in the river. Starosta said the university has collected five other samples from the area looking for more of the radiation, but so far nothing.
The arrival of a “radioactive plume” sounds pretty bad, but scientists repeatedly say running for your life would be an overreaction … refusing to eat fish and avoiding beaches would be too.
In fact, the last time Mike Priddy, supervisor of Washington’s Environmental Sciences Section, and his crew tested shellfish — which is where you would expect to find contaminants, because they filter the water — they found nothing, Priddy told us in February.
“We’re not seeing anything that requires anyone to be afraid,” he said.
He added in an email exchange today: … if the water has radioactive material in it at any level, coming into contact with it will cause the contamination to transfer. That said, the levels of radioactivity we are talking about are VERY low and pose no real health affects regardless of how you are exposed, whether you come in contact with the water or somehow casually ingest it. The levels I have seen in seawater are interesting from a scientific point of view, but well below health concerns.
Nevertheless, it’s not like a little extra radiation is good for you either. So, oceanographers and health department officials from Washington and elsewhere have been monitoring our coastline for radiation that would have come from the wrecked nuclear plant. And there has been plenty of fear- and conspiracy-mongering surrounding the radiation leak from Fukushima.
A fervor was created last winter when a video (below) purporting to show “dangerously high radiation levels” in the sands of Pacifica State Beach in California surfaced in December. That video was quickly countered by state officials, who ran tests and found that what is on the beach remains “well below any levels considered unsafe for humans,” as SFGate reported.
“There is no public health risk at California beaches due to radioactivity related to events at Fukushima,” the California Department of Public Health said.
“Recent tests by the San Mateo County Public Health Department show that elevated levels of radiation at Half Moon Bay are due to naturally occurring materials and not radioactivity associated with the Fukushima incident,” it said.
Yeah, but …
Does radiation from the Fukushima nuclear disaster worry you?
- Yes - scientists et al. either don't know all there is to know about the risk or may not be telling us.
- No - I accept that the amount of radiation making it to our shores is too little to worry about.
Your vote is being added to the total. Votes are not reflected in the tallies immediately.
Some of the airborne radiation — in the form of iodine-131, which is produced by an active nuclear reactor — did cross the ocean shortly after the accident, and state officials did detect small amounts in our air for a couple of months; again, nothing even close to the total amount of “excess” radiation that would be dangerous to a person, Priddy said.
Also, there were those albacore tuna caught off our coast in 2012 with small amounts of some cesium-134 in them.
“We would not have detected it normally,” Priddy said, because the amount was so small. “We had to look hard for it. … Basically, so far, we have only seen a very, very small amount of radioactivity that may have been from Fukushima.”
http://blog.seattlepi.com/bigscience...-it-worry-you/