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.

Comments

Re:So what

[sfcat]

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. And since fish, shrimp and things people eat don't use Cesium to build their body structure, they won't accumulate heavy metals over time. Cesium, like Strontium, is a heavy metal and won't combine with carbon or participate in other biological reactions. 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. But Iodine's isotopes are harder to detect than Cesium's which is why you see these articles about Cesium. 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!

Re:So what

[angel'o'sphere]

The deer pisses out the Cs-137 just like the other isotopes of Cs they consume normally when eating mushrooms.
Only over a considerable amount of time, it is not like: oops I accidentally ate some Cs-137 and now need to go to pee quickly. As long as they eat the mushrooms they have a higher level ...

Heavy metals just don't work the same way as organic molecules. Of course not. They accumulate in the kidneys and leaver, or wander into the bone marrow ... or in this case, no idea why you neglect it: in he nervous system. I told you now several times that Cs is a potassium "ersatz". Everywhere where the body usually uses potassium, cesium is displacing it and thus cesium is bioaccumulated, in everything that is eating it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... scroll to: "Health and safety hazards"

Interesting read, too: accumulation of cesium in human bones: https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/a...

No idea where you got your misinformation about cesium from. It is an alkali metal, obviously it acts everwhere where other alkali metals act.