Pacific bluefin tuna transport Fukushima-derived radionuclides from Japan to California

Hopkins Marine Station, Stanford University, Pacific Grove, CA 93950; and b
School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook,
NY 11794

Daniel J. Madigana, Zofia Baumann, and Nicholas S. Fisher - approved April 25, 2012 (received for review March 22, 2012)

The Fukushima Dai-ichi release of radionuclides into ocean waters caused significant local and global concern regarding the spread of radioactive material. We report unequivocal evidence that Pacific bluefin tuna, Thunnus orientalis, transported Fukushima-derived radionuclides across the entire North Pacific Ocean. We measured γ-emitting radionuclides in California-caught tunas and found 134Cs
(4.0± 1.4 Bq kg−1) and elevated137Cs (6.3± 1.5 Bq kg-1) in 15 Pacific bluefin tuna sampled in August 2011. 

This paper goes into more detail, but that measurement of radiation is key.  The amount, 6.3 Bq per Kg is significantly higher than pre-Fukushima levels, yes.  HOWEVER, it is an insignificant amount of radiation.

It means that, yes, Bluefin Tuna is carrying radiation from Japan to the West Coast faster than ocean currents do the job.  But the resulting Cesium content is miniscule.

These fish were caught off San Diego in August 2011.

http://micheli.stanford.edu/pdf/Madiganetal_PNAS_2012.pdf

Sea floor littered with dead animals? No. Starfish Wasting due to radiation? No.

One of the ideas being floated around is that the "Sea Floor is Littered with the Carcasses of Dead Sea Animals" who died from radiation from the Fukushima disaster.  The stories have all looked to be too far gone into la-la-land for me to even note them here.  A related story is about Starfish Wasting Syndrome, where lots of starfish are dying on both the East and West coasts of the US, which many are also blaming on radiation from Fukushima, but the only evidence I could find was that it's some kind of disease and that large scale starfish die-off's have occurred in the past.

Over on Deap Sea News they've written up debunkings of both stories.

Is the sea floor littered with dead animals due to radiation? No. - According to DSN - the author of the DSN post had formerly worked at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), the institution which supposedly published the source paper behind the story - MBARI has published no paper describing anything of the sort.

MBARI did publish a study titled Energetics of life on the deep seafloor studying the patterns of phytoplankton blooms near Monterey Bay.  Another paper is Smith, K. L., H. A. Ruhl, M. Kahru, C. L. Huffard, and A. D. Sherman. (2013). Deep ocean communities impacted by changing climate over 24 y in the abyssal northeast Pacific Ocean. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1315447110.

Between them DSN says the research focuses on phytoplankton and diatom (tiny sea animals) that have been blooming since 2002, who live then die and their bodies sink to the ocean floor.  In the deep ocean other animals exist to eat those dead bodies.  It's described as "marine snow" and is a naturally occurring thing, that began well before the Fukushima event.

Now, DSN also discounts the idea that the Ocean Is Dying (because of Fukushima).  I wonder what DSN would say to this presentation by Jeremy Jackson, Ocean Apocalypse, he gave recently at the Naval War College in which he said the Ocean is Dying.  In Jackson's telling, rising ocean temperatures, overfishing, pollution, and other effects are causing massive shifts in the mix of animals and plants in the oceans.  The big sea animals are almost all gone, and what's taking place of the once vibrant sea life is slime.  In other words, a half billion years of evolution of sealife is being erased from the ocean.

The kicker?  It has nothing to do with Fukushima and has everything to do with other poisons.

Three Reasons Why Fukushima Radiation Has Nothing to Do with Starfish Wasting Syndrome - DSN has a guest blog post from Chris Mah, a Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History researcher, who "broke" the story of a large-scale die-off of starfish in the Pacific and Atlantic.  He goes over why this has nothing to do with radiation:

Here's how he put it:

1. Starfish Wasting Disease/Syndrome (SWD/SWS) pre-Dates Fukushima by 3 to 15 years. This is probably the most self-evident of reasons. One of the earliest accounts of starfish wasting disease was recorded from Southern California (Channel Islands) in 1997 (pdf).  The account of SWS in British Columbia was first documented by Bates et al. in 2009, and their data was collected in 2008.  Fukushima? March 2011.
2. Starfish Wasting Syndrome Occurs on the East Coast as well as the Pacific. Many of the accounts alleging a Fukushima connection to Starfish Wasting Syndrome forget that there are also accounts of SWS on the east coast of the United States affecting the asteriid Asterias rubens. There is no evidence (or apparent mechanism) for Fukushima radiation to have reached the east coast and therefore the Fukushima idea is again not supported.
3. No other life in these regions seems to have been affected. If we watch the original British Columbia Pycnopodia die-off videos, and the later Washington state die-off vidoes, one cannot help but notice that other than the starfish, EVERYTHING else remains alive. Fish. Seaweed, encrusting animals. etc.

Supposedly radioactive beaches near San Francisco tested clean of Fukushima, radiation is naturally occurring

This is a followup to an earlier post where I went over a video showing elevated radioactivity at a beach near San Francisco.  New information now available is showing that the radiation came from naturally occurring thorium and radon.

This video reads through an article posted on the Half Moon Bay Patch.


Basically, the person who did the earlier video didn't do any analysis.  He walked around and noted some numbers - but the numbers could be any kind of radiation.

That is - a Count on a Geiger Counter is simply the thingy noting a radioactive particle was picked up by the Counter.  It doesn't tell you the source of that particle.  And it's the source of the particle which determines how risky it is.  At least that's my half-assed understanding at this time.

One of the links below was written by Dan Sythe, CEO for International Medcom, the maker of the Inspector geiger counter shown in the video.  He got some samples from the beach and used not only a geiger counter but a multichannel analyzer, and found that the samples contain naturally occurring Radium 226 and Thorium 232

He provided this screen capture:

 Note that all the peaks are different isotopes of Thorium and Radium.  This is a clear sign the material is naturally occurring.

This image is a sample taken from a "deck" in Fukushima Prefecture, and clearly shows peaks for Cesium-137.

Remember that Cesium-137 is not naturally occurring, and is wholly a byproduct of the Nuclear Age.

This video was recorded by someone who was more careful in reporting radiation readings on beaches between Half Moon Bay and San Francisco.


He clearly correlated the radiation readings to the presence (or not) of "dark sand", and concludes that this is naturally occurring radiation.

http://halfmoonbay.patch.com/groups/around-town/p/half-moon-bay-beach-radiation-not-from-fukushima-officials-say

http://blog.safecast.org/2014/01/radiation-on-california-beaches/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturally_occurring_radioactive_material

Radioactivity of sand from several renowned public beaches and assessment of the corresponding environmental risks

Tracing Coastal Sediment Movement By Naturally Radioactive Minerals

California Beach Radiation Not From Fukushima

Radioactive beach in San Francisco because of Fukushima? Probably not

This guy takes his Geiger Counter to the beach he normally frequents, and shows us "high" radiation readings.  And then he claims it's because of Fukushima.  However, carefully thinking about the video we see he's not demonstrating radioactivity in the water, but in the beach sand.

That is, he starts on a bluff above the beach where readings start at 90ish counts per minute, then by the time he is in the mid-section of the beach it rises to 150ish counts per minute, and then drops to 60ish counts per minute at the water.  He walks back and forth across the beach several times and the same pattern repeats.

If this were radiation from Fukushima, wouldn't the water be reading as hot?

I did some yahoogling and found that beach sands often have naturally occurring radiation.  This is from a mineral known as Monazite, which is a highly insoluble rare earth mineral that occurs in beach sand together with the mineral ilmenite, which gives the sands a characteristic color. The principal radionuclides in monazite are from the ²³²Th series, but there is also some uranium its progeny, ²²⁶Ra.  In most cases the dosage is small/minor, but for a few beaches it is major.  See http://www.physics.isu.edu/radinf/natural.htm

Another set of issues are raised by commentors on the YouTube page:

• the only way to tell if this is from Fukushima is to do an isotope analysis to determine origin. the reading is high, but it could be other stuff causing this, even from nearby. It would be great if someone with the ability to determine the isotope data could please test this area....
• You rather stop panicking and turn brains on. CPM (counts per minute) counts ionization events only. It does not tell anything in regards to radiation level or dose. Besides, radiation may be alpha, beta, gamma and all are different in their impact on humans. If you put a Geiger-Mueller counter next to a wrist watch you will also get CPM counts :)
• Ok he peaked at around 150 CPM (air line pilots/flight crew and medical staff get almost twice that exposure daily for hours at a time.)  most professional work environments (outside of office buildings) is 150 cpm a day... which is not dangerous at all, ever had and Xray, well stand on that beach for a few years and you will receive the same dose of radiation.  120 CPM is 1 uSv/hr (microSievert per hour) and 12.5 uSv/hr is considered the threshold for the slightest increased cancer risk or bodily harm... so 12 times more CPM on that beach is needed if you want to be concerned.  Science, it will calm your fears.

In other words - he counted radiation events, but without knowing what kind of radiation it is.

I've been doing some research into geiger counters.  The SE Inspector shown here is one of the better varieties because it has a large geiger-meuller tube, making it more sensitive than the cheaper geiger counters.

But if the person walking around with the geiger counter doesn't know how to interpret the data all bets are off about the usefulness of information that results.  Says the person who knows very little about geiger counters, and just bought one, and may be posting some clueless video in a few weeks.

By the way - yes, this geiger counter is sounding an alarm.  On this device the threshold where the alarm goes off is configured by the user.  You hear him clearly say he set the alarm at 3x what he determined to be "background".  And we see in the video that the alarm sounds every time it went above 100 counts per minute.  Therefore, the alarm isn't something the manufacturer decided was dangerous, but what the guy who owns this thing thought was dangerous.

Is the US West Coast starfish die-off due to radiation?

For a couple months now oceanographers have reported massive die-off's of starfish where the starfish alarmingly melt away into goo in front of you.  Some have taken this as proof that THE RADIATION is here, and causing massive problems.  So let's see what we can find along these lines.

The following articles were turned up with the search phrase "starfish death west coast cause".  Without exception it is described as a disease, though the scientists are still looking for the precise culprit.  They believe it has to do with warmer ocean water.  This sort of disease has struck starfish populations before.  

Disease causes West Coast starfish deaths - http://www.mercurynews.com/california/ci_24446327/disease-causes-west-coast-starfish-deaths - An AP news report from November 4, 2013.   Describes it as "a disease that causes the creatures to lose their arms and disintegrate" that goes by the name "sea star wasting disease."  The die-off is massive, 95% in some locations.

Wasting disease devastating starfish along Sonoma Coast - http://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/20131102/articles/131109902?title=Wasting-disease-devastating-starfish-along-Sonoma-Coast#page=0 - Local news article from November 2, 2013 - Again, it's described as a disease.  It says this disease has struck localized areas in Southern California before, such as in the early 1980's, but never on this scale.  Says that starfish in an aquarium at the San Francisco Presidio had died when seawater from the ocean was pumped into their tank.

Mysterious wasting syndrome is turning West Coast starfish into goo - http://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/animals/stories/mysterious-wasting-syndrome-is-turning-west-coast-starfish-into-goo - November 5, 2013 - Again, it's described as a disease, and mentions that there's a similar disease affecting East Coast starfish "where it has been linked to a virus that follows a period of starfish overpopulation" but "the only observed factor for the starfish wasting syndrome has been warmer-than-usual waters (which could conceivably create a breeding ground for dangerous bacteria)." 

Mysterious disease turning starfish to slime - http://news.msn.com/science-technology/mysterious-disease-turning-starfish-to-slime - Reuters, November 5, 2013 - Again, calls it a disease.

Falling Stars: Starfish Dying From “Disintegrating” Disease - http://science.time.com/2013/11/05/falling-stars-starfish-dying-from-disintegrating-disease/ - November 5, 2013 - Again, calls it a disease.  This is a more in-depth report than some others.  It says that in normal starfish populations this disease affects a small number of individuals, but the scale of the current outbreak is unprecedented.  They don't have an identified root cause, and the wasting disease is actually "a whole set of symptoms without a universal cause."  They believe the warmer ocean water is a primary culprit, because starfish are cold-water animals, and because bacteria can multiply more in warmer water. 

Massive Outbreak Killing Pacific Coast Starfish In Droves - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/04/starfish-deaths_n_4215015.html -  November 5, 2013 - Doesn't say much more than the other reports, calls this a disease.


Massive Starfish Die-Off Baffles Scientists - http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2013/09/09/massive-starfish-die-off-baffles-scientists/ - This is an earlier report than the others, dated in September 2013, meaning it has less details than other reports.  It's interesting because it's closer to a first person report of one scientist on a dive in Alaska.

Video: Sea stars (starfish) die-off seen in West Seattle waters - http://westseattleblog.com/2013/11/video-sea-stars-starfish-die-off-seen-in-west-seattle-waters/ - A blog post from late November 2013, in which an individual diver in Seattle posted some videos of the effects in Puget Sound.  Calls it devastating.


Why Are Sea Stars Dying from New Jersey to Maine? Divers Asked to Report Large Groupings of Starfish - http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/07/130723134250.htm - This July 2013 report goes over an outbreak on the East Coast. 
 
UC Santa Cruz has a page to track the Sea Star Wasting Syndrome - http://www.eeb.ucsc.edu/pacificrockyintertidal/data-products/sea-star-wasting/

They describe it as a disease, and have maps and other data available.  Most of the effect is in the southern half of California, however locations of starfish die-off are present as far north as Alaska.

Fukushima Nuclear Fallout Has Damaged the Thyroids of California Babies

Some scientists have published a peer-reviewed study looking at rates of disease in California babies following the Fukushima nuclear disaster.  They found elevated rates of congenital hypothyroidism (CH) that match expectations based on increased radiation in the environment.  Supposedly.

"We just published a study in the Open Journal of Pediatrics. We looked at official two types of data: one was the EPA statistics on how much radiation was in the air in the weeks and months after Fukushima (it was much higher in the West Coast than in the rest of the country) and number two – we looked at the state California’s official statistics on newborns who are born with a condition called hypothyroidism which is where the thyroid is underactive. It is something that is known to be affected by exposure to radioactive Iodine which is only created in atomic bombs which haven’t been exploded for years and nuclear reactor emissions," explains Joseph Mangano.

Sources:

http://voiceofrussia.com/news/2013_11_26/Fukushima-nuclear-disaster-causes-cancer-and-birth-defects-in-US-newborns-epidemiologist-1487/

http://sandiegofreepress.org/2013/11/elevated-rates-of-thyroid-disease-in-california-newborn-linked-to-fukushima-fallout/

http://www.globalresearch.ca/fukushima-nuclear-fallout-has-damaged-the-thyroids-of-california-babies/5359119
Read more: http://voiceofrussia.com/news/2013_11_26/Fukushima-nuclear-disaster-causes-cancer-and-birth-defects-in-US-newborns-epidemiologist-1487/

True facts about Ocean Radiation and the Fukushima Disaster

This piece, on deepseanews.com, was written by an Oceanographer, and is a debunking of fears around the radiation risks.  The bottom line is - Dilution means that by the time radioactive seawater makes it to the US West Coast, it'll be so far diluted to be barely an effect.

It claims 538,100 terabecquerels (TBq) have been emitted from Fukushima, making it worse than Three-Mile-Island, and less than Chernobyl.

The writer goes over several Maps of Doom that have been bandied around on various blog posts, two of which are completely useless.  This one was described as being a Map of Terror, but at least it shows what the colors mean:

The red shows areas where the radiation concentration is 10,000 times less than the concentration near Fukushima, and the band further out near the US West Coast is 1 million times less concentrated.

The prediction from models are that the Hawaiian Islands will see concentrations of 30 Bq / Cubic-Meter of seawater, and on the US West Coast the concentration will be 20 Bq or less.  (Bq == Becquerels)

I could write a small novel explaining why the numbers differ between the models. For those that love the details, here’s a laundry list of those differences: the amount of radiation initially injected into the ocean, the length of time it took to inject the radiation (slowly seeping or one big dump), the physics embedded in the model, the background ocean state, the number of 20-count shrimp per square mile (Just kidding!), atmospheric forcing, inter-annual and multi-decadal variability and even whether atmospheric deposition was incorporated into the model.

To put the numbers into context they provide this map, coming from the Woods Hole Oceonographic Institute (http://www.whoi.edu/page.do?pid=83397&tid=3622&cid=94989):

It shows the Pacific Ocean concentration of Cs 137 in 1990 was 4 Bq / cubic meter.  That makes the new concentration, thanks to Fukushima, about 10x the 1990 concentration.  The amount measured in 1990 would have been leftover from the Atomic Bomb testing in the Pacific occurring during the 1950's.

The writer of the piece concludes that it'll be safe to eat the fish and to swim in the ocean.

As for leaking groundwater - 300 tonnes per day leaking into the ocean - is that a concern?  It means the radiation won't be a one-time release, but is being released over time.  However the bulk of the release occurred early on.  

Most of what's being released now is Tritium and Strontium.  Strontium is a concern because it collects in bones, hence the risk is from eating fish that have bones in them.  However, the Strontium risk is only for such fish caught near the Japanese coast.

Source: http://deepseanews.com/2013/11/true-facts-about-ocean-radiation-and-the-fukushima-disaster/

Radiation from Japan nuclear plant arrives on Alaska coast

Radiation from the Fukushima power plant has been detected in Canada and Alaska.  The report doesn't say how much radiation has arrived.  It just gives a vague fear that we don't know what the effect on seafood and wildlife will be.

Yes, we don't know that - but if we don't know the quantity of radiation how do we know whether this is a major thing, or a minor thing?

The only statement of the severity is this - "The levels they are projecting in some of the models are in the ballpark of what they saw in the North Pacific in the 1960s," said Douglas Dasher, a researcher at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

The article does point out that there is no routine monitoring, so therefore it's not known whether radiation levels are increasing or decreasing.

The statement, "North Pacific in the 1960's," refers to the fallout from US Nuclear testing on islands in the Pacific during the 1950's and 1960's.  That testing was deemed necessary to fend off Communism.  But it obviously left a fair bit of radioactive contamination in the Ocean. 

But that level of contamination doesn't seem to have been a serious problem.  So if the radiation from Fukushima only gets to that level then the overall thing isn't a big deal?

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/radiation-from-japan-nuclear-plant-arrives-on-alaska-coast-1.2335668

Multi-decadal projections of surface and interior pathways of the Fukushima Cesium-137 radioactive plume

Highlights

• Cs-137 plume strongly diluted by July 2011, reaches American coast by 2014.
• Mode water formation and persistent upwelling affect Cs-137 concentrations.
• Cs-137 enters the deep ocean and exits the North Pacific in the next 30 years.
• Sensitivity to uncertainties in the source function and to interannual variability.

Abstract

Following the March 2011 Fukushima disaster, large amounts of water contaminated with radionuclides, including Cesium-137, were released into the Pacific Ocean. With a half-life of 30.1 years, Cs-137 has the potential to travel large distances within the ocean. Using an ensemble of regional eddy-resolving simulations, this study investigates the long-term ventilation pathways of the leaked Cs-137 in the North Pacific Ocean. The simulations suggest that the contaminated plume would have been rapidly diluted below 10,000 Bq/m³ by the energetic Kuroshio Current and Kurushio Extension by July 2011. Based on our source function of 22 Bq/m³, which sits at the upper range of the published estimates, waters with Cs-137 concentrations >10 Bq/m³ are projected to reach the northwestern American coast and the Hawaiian archipelago by early 2014. Driven by quasi-zonal oceanic jets, shelf waters north of 45°N experience Cs-137 levels of 10–30 Bq/m³ between 2014 and 2020, while the Californian coast is projected to see lower concentrations (10–20 Bq/m³) slightly later (2016–2025). This late but prolonged exposure is related to subsurface pathways of mode waters, where Cs-137 is subducted toward the subtropics before being upwelled from deeper sources along the southern Californian coast. The model suggests that Fukushima-derived Cs-137 will penetrate the interior ocean and spread to other oceanic basins over the next two decades and beyond. The sensitivity of our results to uncertainties in the source function and to inter-annual to multi-decadal variability is discussed.

Ten Years of Fukushima Radiation Crossing the Pacific Ocean

Looks at what the Pacific Ocean will be like after 10 years of radioactive water releases into the Ocean.  In the conclusion the person writes that their personal decision to stop eating fish from the ocean may be unfounded, because it looks like the relative amount of toxicity will be small.  But we don't know enough about the effects of bio-accumulation will be and whether that will result in ocean-caught fish that's too radioactive to eat.  What we do know is that every inch of the Pacific Ocean will become contaminated over time.

http://climateviewer.com/2013/10/22/ten-years-of-fukushima-radiation-crossing-the-pacific-ocean/

Fukushima Radiation Risks from Eating Fish - MINIMAL DUE TO DILUTION

Are radioactive substances from Fukushima being found in fish caught and sold in the United States?  Yes (see report) but the quantities found are minimal, well below what's considered to be safe levels.  See Stanford's report from May 2012 - http://news.stanford.edu/news/2012/may/tuna-radioactive-materials-053012.html

Radioactive cesium from the 2011 Japanese nuclear disaster has been carried across the Pacific Ocean to California waters in the flesh of Pacific Bluefin tuna, say researchers from Stanford and Stony Brook University. Anglers reeled in the slightly radioactive fish off San Diego. The low levels of radioactivity are not thought to a pose a health risk to humans.

Could Fukushima radiation in U.S.-caught fish increase over time to levels that would present a significant health impact to individuals? In our judgment, the answer is “No” due to dilution of the radioactivity released from Fukushima in the vast waters of the Pacific Ocean.

The article goes on to publish a very long and detailed analysis from NRDC’s physicist Tom Cochran who looked at this issue of Fukushima and seafood caught off the U.S. West Coast and Hawaii.  It's worth reading the whole thing.

Case 2: Chronic Leakage into the Sea from Fukushima.  From samples of seawater, Jota Kanda of Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology estimated last year that about 0.3 TBq of radioactive material are leaking into the sea each month. And in this article in New Scientist, Ken Buesseler says the Kanda estimate is probably the best he is aware of, and closely matches figures released on 21 August by TEPCO, of 0.1 to 0.6 TBq per month for cesium-137 and 0.1 to 0.3 for strontium.  At an average leak rate of 0.3 TBq/month, it would take more than 6,000 years to equal the 22 TBq release assumed under case one above. Consequently, the current chronic leaks do not increase the risks associated with consuming fish caught in waters off the west coast of the United States or Hawaii.

Fukushima's radioactive ocean plume due to reach US waters in 2014

A radioactive plume of water in the Pacific Ocean from Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant, which was crippled in the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, will likely reach U.S. coastal waters starting in 2014, according to a new study. The long journey of the radioactive particles could help researchers better understand how the ocean’s currents circulate around the world.

TEPCO estimated that between 20 trillion and 40 trillion becquerels (units of radioactivity representing decay per second) of radioactive tritium have leaked into the ocean since the disaster, according to the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun. The Fukushima plant is still leaking about 300 tons of radioactive water into the ocean every day, according to Japanese government officials.

The Fukushima plant is leaking much less contaminated water today compared with the immediate aftermath of the nuclear meltdown in June 2011 — a period when scientists measured 5,000 to 15,000 trillion becquerels of radioactive substances reaching the ocean.

The biggest threat in the contaminated water that flowed directly from Fukushima's reactors into the sea in June 2011 was huge quantities of the radionuclide called cesium. But the danger has changed over time as groundwater became the main source for leaks into the ocean. Soil can naturally absorb the cesium in groundwater, but other radionuclides, such as strontium and tritium, flow more freely through the soil into the ocean.

California’s coast may receive just 10 to 20 becquerels per cubic meter from 2016 to 2025

About 10 to 30 becquerels (units of radioactivity representing decay per second) per cubic meter of cesium-137 could reach U.S. and Canadian coastal waters north of Oregon between 2014 and 2020.

A large proportion of the radioactive plume from the initial Fukushima release won't even reach U.S. coastal waters anytime soon. Instead, the majority of the cesium-137 will remain in the North Pacific gyre — a region of ocean that circulates slowly clockwise and has trapped debris in its center to form the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” — and continue to be diluted for approximately a decade following the initial Fukushima release in 2011. (The water from the current power plant leak would be expected to take a similar long-term path to the initial plume released, Rossi said.)

Sources:

http://www.livescience.com/38844-fukushima-radioactive-water-leaks.html

Aquatic Fukushima Radiation Plume to Reach West Coast in 2014 -- HIGHLY DILUTED

By March of 2014 a strongly diluted plume of ocean water containing radionuclides from the 2011 Fukushima nuclear incident in Japan will reach the west coast of North America

However, the plume, which contains cesium-137, is so diluted it will be harmless, according to the report, which cites the power of two energetic currents off the Japan coast

Study co-author Erik van Sebille, an oceanographer at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, said that a measurable increase in radioactive material will be observable on the west coast of the United States by the three-year anniversary of the Fukushima nuclear incident.

"However, people on those coastlines should not be concerned as the concentration of radioactive material quickly drops below World Health Organization safety levels as soon as it leaves Japanese waters," he said in a news release.

Oceanographer van Sebille said over time "the great majority of the radioactive material will stay in the North Pacific, with very little crossing south of the Equator in the first decade. Eventually over a number of decades, a measurable but otherwise harmless signature of the radiation will spread into other ocean basins, particularly the Indian and South Pacific oceans."

http://www.natureworldnews.com/articles/3726/20130829/aquatic-fukushima-radiation-plume-reach-west-coast-2014.htm

Breaking News: Fukushima Radiation Affecting Americans And There’s No Way To Stop It

Overly alarmist and maybe even inaccurate reporting on the radiation risk.

It includes information claiming the debris in the ocean heading towards the US is radioactive - when there's no way for that to be true.

Source: http://elitedaily.com/news/world/breaking-news-fukushima-radiation-affecting-americans-and-theres-no-way-to-stop-it/

Why Does FDA Tolerate More Radiation Than EPA?

Since the Environmental Protection Agency began detecting radiation in rainwater and milk at levels above its maximum contaminant level, government officials have been downplaying the importance of EPA’s maximum contaminant level.

They would much prefer us to speak in terms of the Food and Drug Administration’s “Derived Intervention Level.”

The two levels could hardly be more different:

• EPA does not allow drinking water to contain more than 3 picoCuries per liter of radioactive istotopes like iodine-131 and cesium-137.
• FDA allows up to 4,700 picoCuries of iodine-131 in a liter of milk and up to 33,000 picoCuries of cesium-137.

Officials from both agencies—as well as many state governments—explain the difference in terms of time: EPA assumes long-term exposure over 70 years. FDA assumes you’re encountering the radiation all at once.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2011/04/14/why-does-fda-tolerate-more-radiation-than-epa/

Radiation Detected In Drinking Water In 13 More US Cities, Cesium-137 In Vermont Milk

• Unusual Reading At Chatanooga Nuclear Plant

• Milk Contamination At EPA Maximum

• Highest Levels Yet In Boise Rainwater

Radiation from Japan has been detected in drinking water in 13 more American cities, and cesium-137 has been found in American milk—in Montpelier, Vermont—for the first time since the Japan nuclear disaster began, according to data released by the Environmental Protection Agency late Friday

Milk samples from Phoenix and Los Angeles contained iodine-131 at levels roughly equal to the maximum contaminant level permitted by EPA in drinking water, the data shows. The Phoenix sample contained 3.2 picoCuries per liter of iodine-131. The Los Angeles sample contained 2.9. The EPA maximum contaminant level is 3.0, but this is a conservative standard designed to minimize exposure over a lifetime, so EPA does not consider these levels to pose a health threat. The FDA, not the EPA, regulates milk.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2011/04/09/radiation-detected-in-drinking-water-in-13-more-us-cities-cesium-137-in-vermont-milk/

Traces of Japanese radiation detected in 13 US states

Radiation has been detected in the air or water in 13 states, but 'far below levels of public health concern.' Rainwater is called safe to drink. Massachusetts is monitoring milk supply.

Elevated yet still very low levels of radiation from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear crisis have now been detected in the air or water in more than a dozen US states and three territories, federal and local authorities say.

Higher than usual levels of radiation were detected by 12 monitoring stations in Alaska, Alabama, California, Guam, Hawaii, Idaho, Nevada, Saipan, Northern Mariana Islands, and Washington State over the past week and sent to Environmental Protection Agency scientists for detailed laboratory analysis, the agency said in a release Monday.

Unusual, yet still very low “trace amounts” of radiation, were also reported in Massachusetts rain water and by state officials and nuclear power plant radiation sensors in Colorado, South Carolina, North Carolina, Florida, and Pennsylvania, the Associated Press and Reuters reported.

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2011/0328/Traces-of-Japanese-radiation-detected-in-13-US-states