Radioactive bluefin tuna crossed the Pacific from Japan to U.S.
By ALICIA CHANG, AP Science Writer
28 May 2012 Across the vast Pacific, the mighty bluefin tuna carried radioactive contamination that leaked from Japan’s crippled nuclear plant to the shores of the United States 6,000 miles away – the first time a huge migrating fish has been shown to carry radioactivity such a distance. “We were frankly kind of startled,” said Nicholas Fisher, one of the researchers reporting the findings online Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The levels of radioactive cesium were 10 times higher than the amount measured in tuna off the California coast in previous years. But even so, that’s still far below safe-to-eat limits set by the U.S. and Japanese governments. Previously, smaller fish and plankton were found with elevated levels of radiation in Japanese waters after a magnitude-9 earthquake in March 2011 triggered a tsunami that badly damaged the Fukushima Dai-ichi reactors. But scientists did not expect the nuclear fallout to linger in huge fish that sail the world because such fish can metabolize and shed radioactive substances. One of the largest and speediest fish, Pacific bluefin tuna can grow to 10 feet and weigh more than 1,000 pounds. They spawn off the Japan coast and swim east at breakneck speed to school in waters off California and the tip of Baja California, Mexico. Five months after the Fukushima disaster, Fisher of Stony Brook University in New York and a team decided to test Pacific bluefin that were caught off the coast of San Diego. To their surprise, tissue samples from all 15 tuna captured contained levels of two radioactive substances – ceisum-134 and cesium-137 – that were higher than in previous catches. To rule out the possibility that the radiation was carried by ocean currents or deposited in the sea through the atmosphere, the team also analyzed yellowfin tuna, found in the eastern Pacific, and bluefin that migrated to Southern California before the nuclear crisis. They found no trace of cesium-134 and only background levels of cesium-137 left over from nuclear weapons testing in the 1960s. The results “are unequivocal. Fukushima was the source,” said Ken Buesseler of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, who had no role in the research. […]
Oh, the inaccuracies.
First, safe-to-eat limits imply that the contaminated food is the only contaminated food that you will eat. What about the strawberries, the spinach, the mushrooms, the lettuce, and the beef that you're eating, that are also contaminated? How does that math work when there is no longer any "there" that you can send contaminated food, or any "here" that you can flee to?
Second, the safe to eat limits are getting raised based on bad science and wishful thinking massaged by the nuclear mafia.
Third, why wouldn't cesium linger, when it's half life is 30 years and tissues are not saturated? We're just getting warmed up here, as Fukushima continues to spew into the ocean in perpetuity, and the tuna continue to eat lower on the food chain. We are just getting warmed up here on biomagnification, which takes time to develop. The bigger fish, the higher the consumption, and the more accumulation of isotopes, over time.
Fourth, what's missing from the report? We measure cesium 137 because it is toxic to humans. What about the more toxic isotopes spewed by MOX fuel, such as plutonium and uranium?
What does all of this mean for large carnivores at the top of the food chain? Got sushi?
There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.