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How radioactive is the Pacific Ocean around here? Help needed to test.
There currently is no U.S. or international agency monitoring the arrival of radioactive water from Fukushima along the West Coast. Although we don't expect levels to be dangerously high in the ocean or in our seafood as the plume spreads across the Pacific, this is an evolving situation that demands careful, consistent monitoring to make sure predictions are true.
We at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution already have dozens of seawater samples from the coast of Japan out to the middle of the Pacific, but now we need new samples—from up and down the West Coast of North America and anywhere else we can get them. The trouble is, these samples are expensive to collect and analyze. That is why we are turning to you, your community, and your social network for help.
If you want to propose a sampling location near you, all you have to do is raise the cost of testing and shipping ($550 to $600 depending on location) and we will send you a sampling kit with everything you need. We'll also help by setting up a fundraising webpage that you can email to your friends or post on your favorite social media site that will allow you to spread the word and track your progress.
- See more at: https://www.ourradioactiveocean.org/....YsvnZJ0P.dpuf
Re: How radioactive is the Pacific Ocean around here? Help needed to test.
:atom:
This appears to be on the level, and sounds important to me. This is the antidote to unbased fears or can provide an important early warning of a real concern.
Anybody want to head up an effort for Sonoma County?
Quote:
Posted in reply to the post by artur:
There currently is no U.S. or international agency monitoring the arrival of radioactive water from Fukushima along the West Coast. Although we don't expect levels to be dangerously high in the ocean or in our seafood as the plume spreads across the Pacific, this is an evolving situation that
demands careful, consistent monitoring to make sure predictions are true.
We at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution already have dozens of seawater samples from the coast of Japan out to the middle of the Pacific, but
now we need new samples—from up and down the West Coast of North America and anywhere else we can get them. The trouble is, these samples are expensive to collect and analyze. That is why we are turning to you, your community, and your social network for help.
If you want to
propose a sampling location near you, all you have to do is raise the cost of testing and shipping ($550 to $600 depending on location) and we will send you a sampling kit with everything you need. We'll also help by setting up a fundraising webpage that you can email to your friends or post on your favorite social media site that will allow you to spread the word and track your progress.
- See more at:
https://www.ourradioactiveocean.org/....YsvnZJ0P.dpuf
Re: How radioactive is the Pacific Ocean around here? Help needed to test.
Of course I would like accurate, meaningful, and timely testing for radioactive contamination in the waters, air and soil, and I am grateful to anyone who can help make that happen. Unfortunately I do not have the resources to do so. I also think this should be paid for by those who have been promoting and generating nuclear toxicity - so coordination of such a funding mechanism is yet another project.
Quote:
Posted in reply to the post by Barry:
:atom:
This appears to be on the level, and sounds important to me. This is the antidote to unbased fears or can provide an important early warning of a real concern.
Anybody want to head up an effort for Sonoma County?
Re: How radioactive is the Pacific Ocean around here? Help needed to test.
Quote:
Posted in reply to the post by artur:
There currently is no U.S. or international agency monitoring the arrival of radioactive water from Fukushima along the West Coast. Although we don't expect levels to be dangerously high in the ocean or in our seafood as the plume spreads across the Pacific, this is an evolving situation that
demands careful, consistent monitoring to make sure predictions are true.
- See more at:
https://www.ourradioactiveocean.org/....YsvnZJ0P.dpuf
I'm curious about this claim from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. While their efforts to increase monitoring are certainly appreciated, and all such efforts should be applauded and supported, this claim seems to ignore the considerable existing efforts to monitor seawater for arriving radiation along our coast, some of which are described in the Press Democrat article posted below.
No monitoring at all of seawater along the coast for the arrival of radioactive water? Really?
From my brief research on the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution it is clear that it is a highly respected and serious organization. Is it because they are based out of Massechussets that they don't know of some of the efforts already happening here in our area?
I have written to them asking for clarification of their claim and will report back if I get a response.
Scott
https://www.pressdemocrat.com/articl...0209762#page=0
Searching for signs of Fukushima radiation on North Coast
https://pix.pressdemocrat.com/201402...9762/story.jpg
Dr. Cynthia Catton, with the Department of Fish and Wildlife, weighs kelp collected from Van Damme State Park near Mendocino on Tuesday, Feb. 4, 2014. Scientists working at the Bodega Marine Labs will check the kelp for radioactive isotopes associated with the Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan in 2011. (John Burgess / The Press Democrat)
By GUY KOVNER
THE PRESS DEMOCRAT
February 5, 2014, 6:54 PM
Two divers hauled a mesh bag full of common brown kelp out of a Mendocino County cove Tuesday, kicking off a scientific search for evidence that radiation from the crippled Fukushima nuclear reactors has traveled 5,000 miles across the Pacific Ocean to California.
If cesium isotopes from the reactors ravaged by an earthquake and tsunami nearly three years ago in Japan have reached the state, they will be concentrated in kelp that flourishes along the West Coast, experts say.
Initial results from the search, called Kelp Watch 2014 and stretching from Alaska to Mexico, will be posted online by the end of April by marine biologist Steven Manley’s lab at CSU Long Beach.
The year-long project, Manley said, intends to answer questions on the minds of many Californians who wonder if the state’s coastal waters — and the food from them — are as safe as they used to be.
“The public wants to know,” Manley said. “Whenever you deal with radioactivity there’s a real sensitivity. People get scared.”
“It is a huge question,” said Laura Rogers-Bennett, a California Department of Fish and Wildlife environmental scientist based Bodega Marine Laboratory.
Rogers-Bennett and her colleague, Cynthia Catton, collected Tuesday’s sample — the first for Kelp Watch 2014 — close to shore at Van Damme Beach, nearly 100 miles north of Santa Rosa.
Biologists say kelp, which grows in abundance along the coast, acts like a sponge in soaking up elements contained in seawater, including, possibly, radiation.
Fourteen pounds of raw kelp, dried and ground to one liter of powder at the Bodega facility,will be shipped to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, where $80,000 gamma-ray spectrometers will determine if the kelp absorbed cesium isotopes that match Fukushima’s radioactive fingerprint.
The Bodega lab, run by UC Davis, is among the nearly two dozen organizations voluntarily participating in Kelp Watch 2014, aiming to collect kelp this year from more than 45 sites ranging from Alaska to Baja California.
A radioactive plume reaching across the Pacific from Japan is expected to reach California this year, and public interest has spiked.
Google searches for the term “Fukushima California” peaked in January at nearly double the level in March 2011, when the Fukushima plant sustained a meltdown.
“There’s a lot of misinformation out there,” said Pete Kalvass, a Department of Fish and Wildlife marine biologist in Fort Bragg. “It’ll be good to get some results.”
The California Department of Public Health, which periodically tests seawater and sea life for radioactivity, reported last month that all results from 2011 through 2013 were below “laboratory minimum detectable limits.”
Based on information from federal agencies and its own testing, the agency said “there are no health and safety concerns to California residents.”
The state public health agency “has not seen nor heard of any data that suggests any abnormal radiation levels in sea kelp off the California coast,” according to Wendy Hopkins, a department spokeswoman.
Kai Vetter, head of the Applied Nuclear Physics Program at the Lawrence Berkeley lab and a collaborator in Kelp Watch 2014, expects to reach a similar conclusion.
His lab’s website — radwatch.berkeley.edu — notes that research is ongoing but “the basic answer” is that Fukushima’s radiation will turn out to be minimal, with “no harmful effects on the ocean or people in our state.”
Radiation from Fukushima carries a specific ratio of cesium 134 and cesium 137 isotopes, which his equipment can readily identify, Vetter said.
Scientists must also sort out reactor-bred radiation from naturally occurring radiation emanating from soil, minerals, concrete, food and human bodies.
Conventional Geiger counters can’t make that distinction, nor identify the source of any radiation they detect, Vetter said.
“We live be in a world of radiation,” he said. “For many people that’s a big surprise.”
A relatively small amount of background radiation in the Pacific Ocean is left over from nuclear bomb testing during the Cold War, he said.
On the beach at Van Damme, Rogers-Bennett displayed her haul of giant kelp. “See how beautiful they are,” she said, pointing out the textured fronds attached to a stem.
Kelp, a type of marine algae, is a “really good sentinel” because it absorbs and concentrates whatever is in the water column and passes it up the food chain, she said.
Kelp Watch 2014 intends to sample both giant kelp and bull kelp, but divers found none of the latter on Tuesday.
Bull kelp, which grows from a spore to as tall as 50 feet each year along the Sonoma coast, forms a long thin whip capped by a floating ball and an array slender fronds.
Rogers-Bennett said she plans to sample kelp later this year in the county, where there are also pockets of giant kelp.
“This is where I would look first,” said Susan Williams, a professor of ecology at the Bodega lab, referring to the project’s target. “If it’s not in the kelp I would be reassured that not a lot of radiation is getting into the food web.”
Fukushima’s crippled reactors are still leaking tainted water, at a rate of 300 tons — nearly 72,000 gallons — a day, according to a National Geographic report last year.
The Pacific Ocean, with 187 quintillion gallons (187 with 18 zeroes) of water, dilutes Fukushima’s discharge, and models of the radioactive plume indicate that much of it will wind up in the North Pacific Gyre, the circular flow that traps the Great Pacific garbage patch.
But there is “no U.S. government or international plan to monitor” the plume, according to a Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution report last week.
Ken Buesseler, a Woods Hole marine chemist who led the first assessment of Fukushima’s ocean contamination in 2011, is now conducting a sampling of West Coast seawater.
His first report, posted online last week, said that four samples — from Point Reyes, La Jolla and two sites in Washington state — showed “no detectable Fukushima cesium.”
Buesseler and Manley both say sampling done early this year will precede the plume’s arrival on the West Coast, thereby establishing baseline level of seawater radiation.
Kelp Watch 2014’s first sampling period runs through March 5, with subsequent samplings in July and October.
“If we don’t see anything (in the first sampling), we’ll just keep on going, Manley said.
Lack of information about Fukushima radiation breeds suspicion, he noted. “People think there’s a conspiracy,” he said. “We want to alleviate some of that.”
(You can reach Staff Writer Guy Kovner at 521-5457 or [email protected].)
Re: How radioactive is the Pacific Ocean around here? Help needed to test.
Quote:
Posted in reply to the post by Scott McKeown:
I'm curious about this claim from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.
this page describes the effort. https://www.whoi.edu/news-release/ou...update-release
It's a response to fear-mongering, and an attempt to engage the public as citizen scientists. Here's a direct quote:
Quote:
Dr. Roger Gilbert, a radiation oncologist in Mendocino, Calif. raised funds to support analysis of his coastal community’s seawater.
“My motivation was concern over fear-mongering on the Internet about allegedly high levels of Fukushima radiation in the coastal waters of California. I am a radiation oncologist, more familiar than most with radioactivity, and it seemed highly likely that the vast dilution of radioisotopes from Fukushima by the Pacific Ocean would result in a barely (if at all) measurable rise in counts,” he says.
Re: How radioactive is the Pacific Ocean around here? Help needed to test.
Quote:
Posted in reply to the post by Scott McKeown:
https://www.waccobb.net/forums/attac...6&d=1395604012
There currently is no U.S. or international agency monitoring the arrival of radioactive water from Fukushima along the West Coast. Although we don't expect levels to be dangerously high in the ocean or in our seafood as the plume spreads across the Pacific, this is an evolving situation that
demands careful, consistent monitoring to make sure predictions are true.
Quote:
Posted in reply to the post by Scott McKeown:
I'm curious about this claim from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. While their efforts to increase monitoring are certainly appreciated, and all such efforts should be applauded and supported, this claim seems to ignore the considerable existing efforts to monitor seawater for arriving radiation along our coast, some of which are described in the Press Democrat article posted below.
No monitoring at all of seawater along the coast for the arrival of radioactive water? Really?
From my brief research on the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution it is clear that it is a highly respected and serious organization. Is it because they are based out of Massechussets that they don't know of some of the efforts already happening here in our area?
I have written to them asking for clarification of their claim and will report back if I get a response.
Scott
https://www.pressdemocrat.com/articl...0209762#page=0
Reporting back as promised....
I received a nice response from Ken Buesseler who is Director of the Center for Marine and Environmental Radioactivity at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and who is also mentioned in the Press Democrat article linked. I've posted his response below with his permission.
Basically, the issue with the Woods Hole statement is not that there isn't any monitoring going on but that there is no official US Federal Government agency doing water monitoring for arriving radiation. In my view, I considered the participation of the University of California, California State University, and Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, being the core participants in the Kelp Watch 2014 project and who depend on state and federal funding, to be government supported monitoring.
So I guess the issue boiled down to a parsing of the term "no US or international agency".
Ken and his team are obviously doing a great service, and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, particularly the Center for Marine and Environmental Radioactivity branch, along with Kelp Watch 2014, are excellent sources for sound scientific and evidence-based information regarding potential Fukushima radiation in our coastal waters. This is refreshing given some of the alarmist non-evidence-based speculations about Fukushima that have gone viral on the Internet and also in this forum at times.
Scott
Scott-
Thanks for the email and interest in our project. Since we set up the web site I have heard of one Canadian Fisheries funded group, so maybe should remove "international" from this claim, but in the article you sent along, programs like our's and kelp watch, were set up precisely because of the lack of monitoring by federal agencies and public concern.
I have only heard from one state public heath authority (Oregon) and like others, they do not use methods that can detect cesium at the oceans at pre-Fukushima levels, i.e. down to a single Bequerel per cubic meter or less but have methods 500-1000 times less sensitive, so the use of these methods leads to the reporting of "not detected" in all samples does not answer the question- how radioactive is our ocean? which is the goal of our project. FYI, we have been reporting thus far no 134Cs from Fukushima seen yet in any sample, and levels of 137Cs at 1.5-2 Bq/m3, which is consistent with the amount in the ocean today from weapons testing fallout, and far below US EPA drinking water standard of 7,400 Bq/m3.
In fact, reports thus far in the media have been using our program to debunk alarmist claims. Another reason for calling out the lack of federal agency support is to try to get NOAA or DOE engaged as the public needs some reassurance that the levels, though detectable, are not of public health concern.
I am on the road and don't have time for a more detailed response but hope this helps clarify our motivation and reason for this claim. I will ask my staff when I return to remove "international" and consider adding the qualifier "US federal" to the no agency claim.
Sincerely, Ken Buesseler
Ken Buesseler
Senior Scientist, Department of Marine Chemistry and Geochemistry
Director, Center for Marine and Environmental Radioactivity
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
Woods Hole MA 02540 USA, 508-289-2309
Re: How radioactive is the Pacific Ocean around here? Help needed to test.
Quote:
Posted in reply to the post by BManna:
I also think this should be paid for by those who have been promoting and generating nuclear toxicity - so coordination of such a funding mechanism is yet another project.
No one will trust a project funded by those whom are untrusted.
