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on November 19, 2013 at 12:23 PM, updated November 19, 2013 at 8:12 PM
View full sizeThis aerial photo taken on Aug. 31, 2013, shows the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant. Just weeks after Japanese officials acknowledged that radioactive water has been seeping into the Pacific from the tsunami-crippled nuclear power plant for more than two years, revelations of leaks of contaminated water from storage tanks have raised further alarm.Norris is a 42-year-old documentary filmmaker with graying hair tied back in a ponytail. The Manzanita resident already eliminated local seaweed from his diet after reading aboutradiation found in California kelp post-Fukushima. He’s raised $750 in pledges for a community Geiger counter to share between Tillamook and Clatsop counties so residents can test fish and tsunami debris.
He’s not Chicken Little, he said. He just wants his diet to be safe.
“We’re not going to grow three legs,” he said. “But we could get sicker and have a gradual loss of vitality. That’s my concern.”
Along the Oregon coast, while reservations like Norris’ aren’t unheard of, they aren’t common, either. A pocket of doubt persists despite reassurances from scientists and federal health regulators that Pacific-caught seafood is safe to eat.
Health officials say Fukushima radiation doesn’t pose a public health threat in the United States.
That hasn’t stopped lingering concerns. Christina Mireles DeWitt, director of Oregon State’s Seafood Research and Education Center in Astoria, said she’s noticed an uptick in worries recently.
She receives about a call a week from concerned residents who’ve relayed second-hand reports of contaminated fish. Their stories aren’t specific, though, and Mireles DeWitt (who still eats seafood) hasn’t pinpointed what’s causing the increased chatter. “They’re kind of secretive,” she said. “They don’t want to give up their sources.”
Jan Dawson, owner of Mother Nature’s Natural Foods in Manzanita, said the worries wash in with the tsunami debris that appears on the town’s windswept beaches. “Local people think about it because they see the trash,” she said.
Laura Anderson, owner of Local Ocean Seafoods in Newport, said she’s gotten a handful of questions from customers. She’s told them what Oregon State University’s researchers have said: Albacore is safe.
More than two years after a 9.0 earthquake and estimated 45-foot tsunami crippled the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in northern Japan and caused a triple meltdown, Oregon State scientists have continued finding a slight fingerprint of radioactive particles in local albacore, which migrate throughout the Pacific. (Tests on sardines and herring haven’t shown any traces.)
The levels are so infinitesimally low, the researchers say, that a person would need to eat 4,000 pounds of albacore a year just to increase their average annual dose of radiation by 1 percent. “It’s not going to be anywhere close to being a food safety impact,” said Delvan Neville, a radiation health physicist at Oregon State, who’s testing the fish. (He still eats seafood.)
The radioactivity measured in fish is far too slight to register on a Geiger counter, Neville said. Its detection says more about the sensitivity of scientists’ testing equipment, Neville and other researchers said, than it does about the threat to public health.
Concerns along the coast have come as the recovery at Fukushima has haltingly advanced, plagued by accidents, contaminated water spills and leaks. While Tokyo Electric Power Company workers on Monday began removing fuel rods from one reactor that didn’t suffer a meltdown, the cleanup is expected to take years. Miscalculations and other mistakes at Fukushima have left Norris doubtful that the problem is fully understood. Scientists haven’t tested all fish, he said.
“It is scary,” Norris said. “They’re not close to containing it. It is not over.”
Radiation naturally surrounds us. We’re exposed to it from cosmic rays, from naturally occurring radon gas. We receive doses from medical and dental X-rays. Migratory fish in the Pacific have been exposed to it for decades from the fallout of post-World War II nuclear weapons testing.
Fish in the 1980s and 1990s were actually more radioactive because of those weapons tests than those found today with traces of particles from Fukushima, Neville said.
The trace radioactive particles found in albacore are cesium isotopes, most likely released during the meltdowns immediately following the earthquake and tsunami, said Kathryn Higley, head of Oregon State’s nuclear engineering and radiation health physics department. (She hasn’t stopped eating fish, either. “Oh God no,” she said.)
Though a hastily built system of storage tanks holding contaminated cooling water at the plant has been leaking into the ocean, Neville and Higley both said the radioactivity escaping is much, much lower today than the spike that followed in the meltdowns after the earthquake and tsunami. “That slow leak is incredibly small compared to what was in the initial release,” Neville said.
Albacore with measurable traces of radioactivity either picked it up by swimming through a plume moving through the Pacific with “very, very, very diluted” levels of cesium, Higley said, or by eating some other fish with measurable quantities of cesium.
Both the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and federal Food and Drug Administration say the leak won’t impact public health in the United States, based on existing evidence. Though testing shows more radioactive particles in seawater near the plant than before the accident, the NRC said, levels are still well below federal drinking water standards.
-- Rob Davis
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