There’s been a bit of an unnatural glow to seafood’s image since late July, when Tokyo Electric Power Company admitted highly radioactive water has been leaking from the site of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan. Officials now acknowledge hundreds of tons of contaminated water, which had been used to cool damaged reactor cores after the spring 2011 meltdown, has been spilling daily into the ground and likely flowing into the Pacific Ocean.
One blog post making the rounds on Facebook, ominously headlined “At the Very Least, Your Days of Eating Pacific Ocean Fish are Over,” suggests the radioactivity will quickly spread throughout the ocean, contaminating everything in it. That may be rooted in some legitimate science, but leading experts say the reaction is overblown.
An Aug. 22 BBC News article quotes Ken Buesseler, a marine chemist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution who’s studied the spread of Fukushima radionuclides in the Pacific, saying certain radioactive isotopes could accumulate in seafood and present risks to human health. But in an FAQ on the Woods Hole website, Buesseler clarifies it’s only certain species in the coastal waters off Fukushima, in fisheries that have been closed, that are unsafe to eat. He’s not concerned about seafood caught even a short distance from there, much less off the U.S. West Coast.
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