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

Not the first time and won't be the last.

[burtosis]

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.

Re:So what

[angel'o'sphere]

Iodine is a complete different story as it accumulates in your Thyroid.

Cesium, like Strontium, is a heavy metal and won't combine with carbon or participate in other biological reactions
It does. It replaces potassium and acts more or less like it ...

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
Sure ... in your world. In my world they worry about mushrooms, wild boar eating mushrooms, deer eating mushrooms, humans eating mushrooms, deer and wild boar ... oops, and that Caesium.

No idea about the link, but the numbers are clearly in the summary, if you don't like it, google for another one, should be easy.