Canada's National Post reports
Radioactivity from Japan's crippled nuclear reactors has turned up off the British Columbia coast and the level will likely peak in waters off North America in the next year or two, according to a Canadian-led team that's intercepted the nuclear plume.
The radioactivity "does not represent a threat to human health or the environment", but is detectable off Canada's west coast and the level is climbing, a team led by oceanographer John Smith at Fisheries and Ocean Canada (also known as the Department of Fisheries and Oceans) reported [January 5] in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
[...] The background level for Cesium-137 in the Pacific Ocean is about one becquerel (Bq) [...] per cubic metre of seawater. Fukushima has increased the radiation level off the B.C. coast to about 2 Bq and the level is expected to peak about 3 to 5 Bq per cubic metre of water by 2015-16. Canada's drinking-water standard for Cesium-137 is 10,000 becquerels (10 kBq) per cubic metre.
(Score: 4, Funny) by c0lo on Friday January 09 2015, @12:52AM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 3, Informative) by frojack on Friday January 09 2015, @01:38AM
Yeah, maxing out at 5 time the 1 Bq background, but still a long way from 10,000 Bq max allowed in drinking water.
The interesting this is how much longer the seaborne radiation took to get here vs the airborne, which got here in like 5 days [enenews.com].
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by subs on Friday January 09 2015, @02:09AM
Yeah, maxing out at 5 time the 1 Bq background, but still a long way from 10,000 Bq max allowed in drinking water.
Just a note, that last part is also important. Nobody drinks water directly from the ocean. We all drink water that's been filtered through and has sat in aquifers for probably several centuries; or we drink formerly oceanic/sea water desalinated using reverse osmosis, which also filters out radioactive ions.
So I guess the author of that article should summarize the take home message from this as: "Don't drink sea water. But even if you're so stupid that you would (eh how?), it's still 5000x below permissible safety limits."
(Score: 3, Insightful) by hemocyanin on Friday January 09 2015, @04:19AM
I won't be drinking seawater, but May is the Spot Prawn season, which I'm pretty avid about. I'm not this guy, but it's a lot of fun hauling up a pot, hoping to get a jackpot shrimppot like these guys did: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twZstyNhwcc [youtube.com]
Anyway, pointing out the drinking water statistic is obviously meant to be comforting, but that sort of totally ignores the fact that certain organisms are bio-accumulators and will effectively concentrate dilute poisons.
http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Murat_Belivermis/publication/260083768_Biokinetics_of_radiocesium_in_shrimp_(Palaemon_adspersus)_seawater_and_food_exposures/links/02e7e52f68f19b3ea3000000 [researchgate.net]
I don't have the skills to evaluate whether this is a good study, but it seems to suggest that shrimp which eat food contaminated by cesium, are effective bio-accumulators, but that they aren't likely to accumulate cesium just by being immersed in contaminated water. However, since shrimp eat algea, shellfish, and all sorts of stuff, shrimps' food is also a bio-accumulator.
So anyway, I guess my beef is that the pro-nuke lobby is always trying to say that radioactive contaminants are safe by sort of glossing over things with misleading information. Realistically, I don't know if the shrimp I catch this year will be worse than in prior years, but the whole "drinking water level" thing is basically a non-sequitur. That's like saying "don't worry about getting shot in the head with that lead bullet, if you dissolved it in ten million gallons of water, that water would still meet Federal drinking water standards." OK ... and so fucking what?
(Score: 2, Informative) by khallow on Friday January 09 2015, @04:03PM
That's like saying "don't worry about getting shot in the head with that lead bullet, if you dissolved it in ten million gallons of water, that water would still meet Federal drinking water standards." OK ... and so fucking what?
As has been noted before, about three quarters of the radioactive cesium in sea water comes from decades old nuclear testing (and it would have been at a considerably higher concentration in the past). If there was an actual problem, you've been exposed to it for as long as you've been an avid Spot Prawn season participant.
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Friday January 09 2015, @08:43PM
( http://www.slv.se/sv/grupp1/Risker-med-mat/Radioaktivitet-och-bestralning/Radioaktiva-amnen/Tio-ar-efter-Tjernobyl/ [www.slv.se] in case anyone wants to use google translate, if you are worried about radiation in food that page probably is worth a read since it discusses how the radiation has mitigated during different circumstances.. Do however keep in mind that fukushima-los angeles is about eight times the distance of chernobyl-stockholm, and also that chernobyl released about eight times as much radiation as fukushima did)
Below is the swedish guidelines for radioactivity in foodstuff (set after the chernobyl incident):
(Livsmedelsverket would probably be called something like "The Food Safety Agency" in english-speaking countries)
Livsmedelsverkets recommendations:
Food containing up to 300 Bq/kg can be consumed in a normal fashion.
Food containing 300-1 500 Bq/kg should not be consumed more than a couple of times a week
Food with higher levels shouldn't be eaten more than a few times a year
Food with levels above 10 000 Bq/kg shouldn't be eaten at al.
-- translation over - below is my own personal ranting about the US worries --
It probably is worth nothing that the EU-limits are 370 and 600Bq/kg depending on which kind of foodstuff.
Quite honestly where you live will probably have a greater impact since the swedish guidelines are set to only increase your exposure with at most 1mSv/year, and there are really no medical evidence for harm below 50mSv/year (and in case you worry about 10mSv/yr or less you would in effect argue for a mass evacuation of the finnish town Tampere)
Oh, and in specific regards to carrion-eaters of the sea, in sweden (and also in finland) we have a tradiation of "kräftskiva" ("crayfish party") where we overindulge on crayfish once a year (well, and recently we also do the same thing during Surströmmingsskivan ("the fermented baltic herring party") and not uncommonly also during midsommer)
(And personally as someone living in northern europe; the american worry about radiation from fukushima seems a bit odd - we still have more radiation remaining in our soil from the chernobyl incident than you will peak at from fukushima)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 10 2015, @08:35AM
we still have more radiation remaining in our soil from the chernobyl incident than you will peak at from fukushima
That cannot be. The cloud from Chernobyl drifted east, and would have had to cross several mountain ranges before it could have reached Sweden.
The cloud from Fukushima also drifted east, and between there and North America is only open sea.
Americans worrying about the additional radiation is indeed odd though, for the following reason:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9lquok4Pdk [youtube.com]
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Sunday January 11 2015, @06:29AM
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#National_and_international_spread_of_radioactive_substances [wikipedia.org]
Sweden and norway was hit harder than most people expect.
Also, Forsmark (about 110km/70miles north of stockholm) Nuclear Power Plant was the first western installation to report elevated radioactivity during the chernobyl incident...
BBC also has a few maps of how the radiation eventually settled at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/spl/hi/guides/456900/456957/html/nn3page1.stm [bbc.co.uk]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 09 2015, @12:55AM
Note that my suggested dept. was
from the don't-panic dept.
...so, thanks to the editor for choosing another that was completely different.
-- gewg_
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 09 2015, @01:13AM
The background level for Cesium-137 in the Pacific Ocean is about one becquerel (Bq)
There is no "background level" for Cs-137. The "background" is all human produced, mostly through nuclear weapon testing.
http://physics.isu.edu/radinf/natural.htm [isu.edu]
Anyway, there is real natural radioactivity in oceans, like 33 Bq/m3 from Uranium and 11 Bq/m3 from Potassium and another 5 from Carbon and there a few others.
The Cessium being detected is not yet diluted hence why it can be detected. Similar to all the garbage that is being washed up on shores from the tsunami (debris from the tsunami is much worse problem)
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/tsunami-garbage-piling-up-on-west-coast-beaches-1.1234304 [www.cbc.ca]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 09 2015, @02:35AM
http://www.radiationnetwork.com/ [radiationnetwork.com]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 09 2015, @02:42AM
From back in Novemeber: [sciencemag.org]
measured a high of just 8 becquerels of radiation per cubic meter in the samples. Of that, he says, less than 2 becquerels came from cesium-134 traced to Fukushima. The remainder is largely from strontium-90 and cesium-137: Some of that is fallout from mid-20th century atomic bomb tests in the Pacific, and some may have come from Fukushima—these isotopes lack the half-life fingerprint that ties cesium-134 to the Japanese disaster. The total level of radiation is hardly worth worrying about, Buesseler says: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency guidelines for drinking water allow up to 7400 becquerels per cubic meter
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Friday January 09 2015, @03:15PM
Jeez, you make it sound like randomly detonating nuclear explosives under water wasn't a great idea.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 09 2015, @10:46AM
I first read the title and thought it meant it had travelled from the east coast of and ended up on the west coast of Japan.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 09 2015, @01:05PM
Yeah, that's the natural way of reading it.
It's one thing to claim that Soylent is an American site, so by default we are talking about the US. But when we are already talking about Japan, suddenly to assume mid-sentence that we are now talking about the US, that's not just grammatically wrong, it's also stupid.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 09 2015, @03:31PM
Apart from having a platform for your inferiority complex-based bitching, or just your basic desire to shit on anything related to the US, I don't think it is a stretch to assume "West Coast" has to do with North America given that the news is coming from Canada's National Post. If the news was coming from The Australian, and no coast was explicitly mentioned, then I would feel safe going out on a limb and assume they must be talking about the west coast of Australia. Also, given the location of Japan, it isn't unreasonable to assume if the story is about showing up on the west coast of somewhere, that this somewhere probably lies east of Japan, and given that the most dominant land mass east of Japan is North America, you're probably safe to jump to that conclusion.
Also note that in the article summary, nowhere does it mention the US. It actually mentions "Canada" four times and "North America" once. The very first sentence says "British Columbia", and that happens in the middle of the sentence, so it is pretty safe to say that mid-sentence we have jumped from Japan and are now talking about Canada. For what it is worth, I think here the stupid one is the one you see when you look in the mirror.
You seem to be lacking in common sense and basic reading comprehension, or perhaps you are very geographically challenged and believe both British Columbia and Canada are part of the US, but whatever the case, yours and the OP's posts are not only mis-placed criticism, but they make you look pretty damn stupid as well.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Saturday January 10 2015, @12:49AM
I think it's fine, although of course I'm US-biased, but hear me out.
There are certain set phrases that always refer to specific things. For example, "haiwai" in Chinese literally means "foreign" ("beyond the ocean"), but in Chinese it ALWAYS means outside of CHINA. Likewise, "guonei" literally means "domestic" ("within country"), but ALWAYS means in China, even when spoken by foreigners in a foreign country.
Some other examples of varying quality:
SoCal, NorCal = South/North California
Cal = UC Berkeley
West Side = West Manhattan
East Coast = US East Coast
Disclaimer: Obviously if it is clearly and explicitly defined to refer to something else, e.g. "meiguo de haiwai" = "outside of US's oceans", then it means what it says, but otherwise, these proper nouns/set phrases all have commonly understood meanings.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 2) by Magic Oddball on Saturday January 10 2015, @04:53AM
I'd disagree regarding the use of "West side" -- people living in suburbs/cities that have grown enough to informally split into "old" and "new" (or affluent vs. non-affluent) communities by direction often use "[direction] side" to specify which part of town they're referring to. If you do a generic web search for "Eastside" or "Westside" you'll find the sites point to communities all over the freaking place; it's definitely not specific to New York/Manhattan.