Fukushima Cesium Reaches the West Coast
Fukushima Radiation Makes Landfall On U.S. West Coast- And It is Only The Beginning
By Whitney Webb
Seaborne Cesium 134, a radioactive isotope released by the 2011 Fukushima disaster, has been detected on the US’ Pacific coast for the first time by independent researchers
After the catastrophic triple meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in 2011, the Japanese government and the plant’s parent company, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), worked to cover up the damage done and downplay the amount of radiation the disaster had released into the environment. Though the disaster’s many impacts have been suspiciously absent from mainstream media reports in the years since, the radiation pouring out of the plant’s damaged reactors have never stopped.
To this day, 300 tons of contaminated, radioactive water flow into the Pacific Ocean every day as many of the leaks can never be sealed due to the extreme heat. Now, nearly six years after the meltdown, radiation from Fukushima has made landfall on the West coast of the United States, signaling a dangerous new era for residents and wildlife along the Pacific coastal region.
Researchers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), a crowd-funded team of scientists, announced yesterday that they had detected, for the first time, seaborne cesium 134 in seawater on the shores of Tillamook Bay in Oregon. The group has been monitoring the waterborne radiation as it extends from Fukushima across the Pacific for years. According to WHOI as well as other scientists, cesium 134, a dangerous and carcinogenic radioactive isotope, could only have originated from the Fukushima disaster due to its short half-life, or rate of decay.
The samples themselves contained 0.3 becquerels/m3 of the isotope, a relatively small amount that some researchers and corporate media outlets say poses “no risk to humans or the environment.” However, there is no such thing as “safe” amounts of radiation, which is particularly true of radioactive cesium as it imitates potassium within the body.
Japanese citizens were also told there was nothing to worry about, despite the fact that cancer rates have spiked since the incident. The real and unstated danger here is that of bioaccumulation. Bioaccumulation refers to the gradual build-up over time of chemicals in an organism, absorbing the substance at a faster rate than it is excreted.
Now, that Fukushima radiation has reached the US, those living on the West Coast or eating fish from that region could be at risk if they consume radioactive water or fish as all consumed cesium would remain in their body, continuously causing damage until it is excreted.
Children are said to be especially at risk. Another reason why there is cause for concern is that these samples were actually collected in January 2016 and not tested until recently, suggesting that landfall may have happened earlier than thought. This, in turn, would also mean that higher levels of cesium as more of Fukushima’s radiation has made contact with Western coastal shores in the months since as researchers have said that radiation will not “peak” until well after the plume’s initial landfall.
No matter how often the Japanese government, TEPCO, or the corporate media say that radiation from Fukushima is nothing to worry, ignoring a problem does not make it go away. The world’s oceans, particularly the Pacific Ocean, are in the midst of an unprecedented crisis as mass die-offs of fish and coral are signaling that something is horribly wrong. These trends, combined with the devastating effects of over-fishing, led the World Wildlife Fund to recently warn that all marine life could die out before the year 2050, less than forty years from now.
It is incredible that a nuclear disaster that has leaked 300 tons of radioactive water into the ocean every day for the last five years could have no effect on the massive environmental crisis unfolding before our eyes. Until Fukushima’s consequences are acknowledged and treated with the concern they clearly merit, we will continue to be unable to understand the true scope of the problem.
Source: trueactivist.com
Re: Fukushima Cesium Reaches the West Coast
Quote:
Posted in reply to the post by Star Man:
sure, another conspiracy. Not to say they don't downplay bad news, but to be crude they're essentially just polishing a turd. It shouldn't fool anyone what's inside. A full-blown campaign to hide the truth is more serious but there's no evidence of that.
Two quotes:
Quote:
The levels are very low and shouldn't harm people eating fish from the West Coast or swimming in the ocean, according to Ken Buesseler, a senior scientist at
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
"To put it in context, if you were to swim everyday for six hours a day in those waters for a year, that additional radiation from the addressed cesium from Japan ... is 1000 times smaller than one dental x-ray," Buesseler said in a phone interview.
assuming that Woods Hole's not in on the conspiracy too. And I know Snopes is anathema to a lot of conspiracy-theorists and, for that matter, right- and left-wing extremists. But anyway:
Quote:
References to these news accounts were widely circulated on the Internet accompanied by a color graphic supposedly showing the flow of radioactive discharge from Fukushima all the way across the Pacific Ocean to the western coasts of North and South America and down to Antarctica:
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However, that chart did not actually track or measure radioactive discharge emanating from Fukushima in 2013, or any other aspect of the Fukushima disaster. It was a plot created by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) immediately after the Tohoku earthquake in March 2011 showing the
wave height of the tsunami that followed. It had (and has) nothing to do with the flow or spread of radioactive seepage from Fukushima.
As for whether the current Fukushima “emergency” poses a danger to residents of the U.S., American officials have stated that the diluting effects of the vast Pacific Ocean expanse would likely neutralize any deleterious effects from the radioactive seepage by the time it reached U.S. shores:
In the United States, across the Pacific, there was no sense of alarm.
“With the amount of dilution that would occur, any kind of release in Japan would be non-detectable here,” said David Yogi, spokesman for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
https://www.snopes.com/photos/technology/fukushima.asp
Re: Fukushima Cesium Reaches the West Coast
Thank you Podfish.
Star Man
Quote:
Posted in reply to the post by podfish:
sure, another conspiracy. Not to say they don't downplay bad news, but to be crude they're essentially just polishing a turd. It shouldn't fool anyone what's inside. A full-blown campaign to hide the truth is more serious but there's no evidence of that.
Two quotes:
assuming that Woods Hole's not in on the conspiracy too. And I know Snopes is anathema to a lot of conspiracy-theorists and, for that matter, right- and left-wing extremists. But anyway:
https://www.snopes.com/photos/technology/fukushima.asp
Re: Fukushima Cesium Reaches the West Coast
I attempted to delete this post because Podfish discovered on Snopes that the article is not accurate, i.e., fake actually. The diagram is not about the spread of Cesium 134, but in fact is a diagram about the waves that emanated from the earthquake. Amounts of radiation are small. The web site would not allow me to delete the article because people had commented. I apologize for not checking first.
Star Man
Quote:
Posted in reply to the post by Star Man:
Re: Fukushima Cesium Reaches the West Coast
Quote:
Posted in reply to the post by Star Man:
Thank you Podfish.
Star Man
sure, you're welcome. As probably is getting pretty apparent, I'm very suspicious of the information that comes from the non-MSM since it's so often advocacy. That's not to say that the MSM is an unbiased source, but they have (or at least they used to have) higher journalistic standards about trying to be balanced (though "Fair and Balanced" kinda put an end to that term) and writers educated in how to check a story. They do have three main biases you have to account for: comfort with the status quo, preference for dramatic/blood&guts stories, and relentless search for binary stories where they always find (usually false) equivalencies without giving the reader enough information to tell when one point of view is nonsense.
