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Fukushima Contaminants Found As Far North As Alaska's Bering Strait
Radioactive contamination from Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant hit by a tsunami in 2011 has drifted as far north as waters off a remote Alaska island in the Bering Strait, scientists said on Wednesday. Reuters reports: Analysis of seawater collected last year near St. Lawrence Island revealed a slight elevation in levels of radioactive cesium-137 attributable to the Fukushima disaster, the University of Alaska Fairbanks Sea Grant program said. The newly detected Fukushima radiation was minute. The level of cesium-137, a byproduct of nuclear fission, in seawater was just four-tenths as high as traces of the isotope naturally found in the Pacific Ocean. Those levels are far too low to pose a health concern, an important point for people living on the Bering Sea coast who subsist on food caught in the ocean.
Those levels are far too low to pose a health concern, an important point for people living on the Bering Sea coast who subsist on food caught in the ocean, Sheffield said. Until the most recent St. Lawrence Island sample was tested by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the only other known sign of Fukushima radiation in the Bering Sea was detected in 2014 by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Those levels are far too low to pose a health concern, an important point for people living on the Bering Sea coast who subsist on food caught in the ocean, Sheffield said. Until the most recent St. Lawrence Island sample was tested by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the only other known sign of Fukushima radiation in the Bering Sea was detected in 2014 by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
There are lots of contaminants from lots of things in lots of places.
We can detect tiny trace amounts of them with the instruments we have today.
And of course there is no health concern. I'm glad that was in the summary, because there are people who are ignorant enough to believe otherwise.
The only people that were happy with Fukushima were the geologists that use nuclear markers in sediment samples. With air testing of nukes long gone and Chernobyl fading there were plenty of labs that popped champagne that day.
I guess you could maybe define it as North-East, but any way you slice it (even considering projection madness) Alaska is a fair bit east of Alaska... really pretty much Russia is north of Japan.
By saying "as far north as" you are really saying something along the lines of about as far north as from the bottom of the U.S. to the top,
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The only people that were happy with Fukushima were the geologists that use nuclear markers in sediment samples. With air testing of nukes long gone and Chernobyl fading there were plenty of labs that popped champagne that day.
New conspiracy theory: The geologists somehow triggered the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, in order to cause the meltdown and create new radioactive markers in the sediment.
Proof: Why else would they have champagne chilled and ready to go?
Like the time a Russian spy satellite powered by a nuclear reactor burned up in the upper atmosphere releasing roughly 90 lbs of uranium particles into the atmosphere? Everyone alive at the time probably has a few atoms of it in their bodies. While trivial compared to background radiation this kind of pollution can easily get out of hand so serious regulation and cleanup is necessary but people shouldn't get too worked up as natural sources of radiation are everywhere and dwarf the trace amounts we are detecting in the op article.
...
Uh
Did you just say Alaska is east of Alaska? I mean, yeah, one of my feet is east of my other foot by some measure, and I suppose one of my nuts is east of the other nut, but not really sure that matters
Sigh. The worst kind if pedant
Nah, geologists have got rocks in their heads. :)
That's pretty good, you should write an ebook.
Swimming freely in the ocean and ingesting all this radioactive waste and pooping it out near Alaska. This is why Japan should be allowed to 'research' all the whales.
I guess most people figured out what I meant from the context of the article (and my subject) but I have to admit the error there, thanks for pointing it out!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
New conspiracy theory: The geologists somehow triggered the 2011 earthquake and tsunami,
I have to say that theory has some good traction, as who else would know best HOW to trigger an earthquake?
As the old saying goes, a little knowledge and a lot of dynamite is a dangerous thing.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"The level of cesium-137, a byproduct of nuclear fission, in seawater was just four-tenths as high as traces of the isotope naturally found in the Pacific Ocean."
So, that's saying there was a reduction of 60% over previous natural levels.
I suspect they meant to say the levels increased by 40%, but innumeracy.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
There is absolutely nothing remarkable about these results. They have been fully expected for years.
I mean, it might actually matter that the circulation patterns in the Pacific are pretty well known.
Washington State was given a warning to watch for radionuclides shortly after the Fukushima incident. It is absolutely no surprise to anybody that it gradually made its way further northward.
You shouldn't have the same sentence twice in a summary.
Way too low to be any impact to life, and probably below the level of detection just 10 years ago. The problem arises when we can detect things - way below safe levels - and people go OMG WE HAVE XXX PRESENT!
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Alaska is North of Japan, due to being higher in Latitude. Just like San Francisco is North of Los Angeles. Heading straight North from Los Angeles and you miss SF by quite a bit, as SF is actually NNW of LA; but it's a general direction that matters here. in that regard, Alaska is North of Japan, and Japan is North of Hong Kong.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
The Pacific Ocean in the Northern Hemisphere circulates in a clockwise direction. That puts Alaska as the 2nd place the current will reach after Russia.
This isn't news. This is expected.
Some of the photons from Fukushima have spread as far away as Alpha Centauri.
Just like San Francisco is North of Los Angeles.
Sure but we are not talking about that kind of deviation, it's more like saying New York City is north of Los Angeles. Yes it is technically north, but there is a whole lot of east there as well you are ignoring... Have you ever heard anyone define NYC as being "North of LA"? No, even though technically it is correct - it's not a good descriptive statement.
I was not saying it's not technically correct, just that the phrasing is odd to me. It's also kind of amusing to think of Japan as being considered in "the east" yet something Japan did is affected The West, however slightly, by sending something East (and yes a bit North).
Go look at a globe (virtual or otherwise) and see what I mean. I believe Alaska is five timezones away from Japan... (it's across the international dateline but still).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
With sufficient sensitivity you could detect a flea fart in the Pacific. But, it is academic, not useful.
This is obviously fake news. Everyone knows that a nuclear meltdown spreading radioactive waste far and wide is UNPOSSIBLE. Atomic power is TOTALLY SAFE. Just ask the three-headed talking fish off the Fukushima coast - they'll tell you.
Oh I agree, my post is pedantic AF to use the kids lingo. Just felt compelled to bring it up for the sake of discussing the nuances of English.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If people eat less fish there might be hope yet for the oceans!
Fukushima and Chernoblyl are tiny bumps on the chart of radiation from nuclear testing and combined they are a tiny bit of natural background radiation.
So let us get this in terms of reality. So there was .4 becquerels found in 1 tonne of seawater. That's the equivalent of 1/4 of a slice of a banana? This has zero effect on the environment. To be clear if you drank 40 million tonnes of this seawater and retained all the Fukushima radiation for one year you would have reached to lowest amount of exposure shown to be able to cause cancer.
Immediately after the accident, the U.S. changed their radioactivity standards. West-coast fish should be checked for radioactivity.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
I do recall seeing Thunderf00t make a lot of hay out of certain idiot YouTubers claiming California would become a RADIOACTIVE wasteland because of Fukushima.
Here's his video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2PxY-wOrI8
I guess the rightwingers must have been the ones using -1 moderation to silence a word they don't want heard. I answered the other AC's question, they asked "so what", and the so what is that the problems of nukes are not local like a death installing solar and falling from the roof, but international, like this story.
But you didn't WANT an answer to that, you just wanted to whataboutism it.
The article heading doesn't say north of japan, just "as far north as Alaska". Are you trying to say that if you're not in the same timezone as Japan you cannot be further north than it????
...not how big Fukushima was. All they're doing is taking some ocean water, putting it in a gamma-ray spectrometer, and looking for a signal corresponding to a short-lived isotope of cesium that is characteristic of fission reactions.
What's impressive about the above is they've manged to pick out the cesium signal from the 100x larger gamma-ray emission of naturally occurring potassium.
As for how much people should worry, biological effects don't depend on specific wavelength (only total energy), so this has all the impact of a laser pointer in the Sahara at noon.
(By the way, cesium and potassium, both being alkali metals, have almost identical biological absorption, distribution, and excretion patterns. I simplify a bit because your body does distinguish sodium and potassium, but your body really can't tell potassium, rubidium and cesium apart.)
Perhaps you should stop talking about stuff you have no freaking idea about?
Since when has that ever stopped you.
Your body treats cesium like potassium. It does not bioaccumulate. Your human body, perhaps. No idea. But how is that relevant when your food does?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...
Your link is paywalled and we can only read the abstract.
Then pay the money, that's what I do.
That's why most experts worry about Iodine and not Cesium or Strontium when evaluating the risk of bio-accumulation of medium lived fission products.
Cs137 and Sr90 are treated like Iodine and Potassium by the body, IIRC. They don't worry about Iodine, they use Iodine in to try to block the uptake of Cs137 if you are exposed to that radio-isotope.
But Iodine's isotopes are harder to detect than Cesium's which is why you see these articles about Cesium.
They're all hard to detect in food because the water in the food acts as a moderator to the alpha, beta and gamma radiation radiation emitted by radio-isotope.
The fact we can detect it at all says more about the sensitivity of our instruments than risk to the environment. They are measuring a difference of 0.4 atomic events per volume of seawater! Remember the conversion factor there is on the order of 10^22!
No, what it says is the instruments aren't sensitive enough to protect the food supply when foodstuffs are moving in tons. How are you going to detect Pu-239 in a ton of lettuce? Plutonium Chloride is highly soluble and treated like iron by the body as the beggining of many metabolic processes.
Santa Claus is coming to town.
Please do not listen to idiots like this.