Fukushima Radiation Detected on U.S. West Coast

Seaborne radiation from Japan’s Fukushima nuclear disaster has been detected in seawater samples taken from Tillamook Bay and Gold Beach in Oregon, researchers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution have announced. [1]

The institution’s chemical oceanographer, Ken Buesseler, has been tracking the radiation plume in a crowdfunded effort “to monitor the ongoing spread of radiation across the Pacific and its evolving impacts on the ocean,” the institution’s website states.

Read: Japan to Release Radioactive Water from Fukushima into the Sea

The researchers say they know the radiation, cesium-134, had to come from Fukushima because of its short half-life.

The isotope was also detected in November in a Canadian sockeye salmon sampled from Okanagan Lake in the summer of 2015, the Fukushima InFORM project said. The level detected was more than 1,000 times lower than the action level established by Health Canada.

InFORM assesses the radiological risks to Canada’s oceans posed by the Fukushima disaster. It is a partnership of 12 academic, government, and non-profit organizations, including Woods Hole.

According to the researchers, in both cases, levels are so low that they don’t pose a danger to humans or the environment. But the discoveries show that nearly 6 years after the 9.0 earthquake and subsequent tsunami that ravaged Fukushima (even though the disaster might not be in the headlines every day), the ramifications haven’t disappeared. In fact, a full clean-up is expected to take 40 years. [1]

Read: Malaysian Man’s Photos Show Abandoned Fukushima “Exclusion Zone”

And were it not for the institution, we might never have discovered the radiation at all. The Woods Hole website states:

“Despite concerns, there is no US government agency monitoring the spread of low levels of radiation from Fukushima along the West Coast and around the Hawaiian Islands—even though levels are expected to rise over coming years.”

The Oregon samples were taken in January and February of 2016 and later analyzed. Those results will grow in importance when it comes to tracking the radiation plume, because cesium-134’s short half-life will make it harder to detect as time progresses.

Buesseler’s data concluded that concentrations of cesium-137, another Fukushima isotope, have increased considerably in the central northeast Pacific, a recent InFORM analysis revealed. Fortunately, right now, they’re still at levels that pose no concern.

The contamination is progressing towards the U.S. east coast at an extremely slow speed. It’s creeping across the Pacific, really. Cullen says that when radiation levels eventually peak, they still won’t be a health concern. But that could all change if, say, another major disaster or accident occurs at Fukushima, which houses more than 1,000 enormous steel tanks of contaminated water and hundreds of tons of molten fuel.

The worst-case scenario? The molten fuel could melt through steel-reinforced concrete containment vessels into the ground, where radiation would spread uncontrollably in the surrounding soil and groundwater, and eventually into the sea. Says Buesseler:

“That’s the type of thing where people are still concerned, as am I, about what could happen.”

Experts: US Being Hit by ‘Twice As Much’ Radiation as Originally Reported

In 2014, the spokesperson for the Washington Environmental Sciences Section said that the levels of radiation in California and along the Eastern Pacific Coast were nothing more than what we would be exposed to by ‘getting a simple X-ray.’

On the contrary, many experts believed that we were being kept in the dark over the radiation levels inside the United States. One such expert reported that the levels were, in fact, ‘twice as much’ as we have been originally told.

We can first look at the lack of real monitoring, as well as the professionals who are raising the real concerns over this issue.

Dan Sythe, the CEO of International Medcom, believed that the lack of federal monitoring of radiation levels reaching California from Japan was suspect. Sythe reported that the radiation reaching California was at the front edge of the plume, and the concentration was expected to increase for the next 2 to 3 years.

“It is worrisome,” he said, “that what’s happening now in Japan will reach North America in about three years.”

Nuclear Expert Arnie Gunderson said:

“In addition to the radioactive plume off the Canadian coast], there’s also another plume heading a little bit further south, down near Oregon coast into California… We are not at the peak, it’s still coming, and it will continue to come as long as Fukushima continues to bleed into the Pacific, we’re seeing the beginning of this… The problem is that the fish that live in that water bioaccumulate that material l. . . there will still be a huge residual amount of radiation in the soil and in the groundwater so that the site will continue to bleed into the Pacific a century or more.”

Read: Radiation Levels ’18 times higher’ than Reported

Fission Products Leaking into the Ocean

The estimations of fission products (i.e. carcinogenic and radioactive particles) that leaked into the ocean and carried by currents to the Pacific Coast of the U.S. were staggering.

From the start of this crisis, understandably, people have wanted to look the other way. It is a huge issue, and it seems there is little we can do about it, but this is not true.

The expert stated that:

“Releases at these levels would mean ‘many hundreds of kilograms’ of ‘many other fission products!’”

In this report from July, 2014, conducted by the World Meteorological Society and the Internal Civil Aviation Organization, it is stated that:

“Fukushima fully showed reliable source terms for assessing accident severity and consequences in real-time were not readily available in the early phase… The inherent uncertainty involved poses questions in the accuracy of the modeled results which could differ from the observation by orders of magnitude.”

This was corroborated by the Central Institute for Meteorology and Geodynamics (ZAMG), by WMO team member Gerhard Wotawa, et al, 14th Conference on Harmonisation within Atmospheric Dispersion Modelling:

“Only minutes after the [Unit 1 explosion] was disclosed, the first model simulation of the emergency response system was initiated…source term was estimated based on experiences from Chernobyl… a continuous release rate of [100 quadrillion Bq/day of Iodine-131], [10 quadrillion Bq/day of Cesium-137] and [10 quintillion Bq/day of Xenon-133]… CTBTO [data was used, which has] a very high accuracy…

The plume left Japan and… reached the western coast of North America on March 18… [The] ZAMG… estimate amounted to about [400 quadrillion Bq of I-131] and [40 quadrillion Bq of Cs-137]… Indication is found that significant amounts of 131I, 137Cs and 133Xe were already set free during the first days of the accident, exceeding initial estimates by orders of magnitude.

Not only were actual measurements in California thousands of times higher than ZAMG/CTBTO estimates (see chart, Mar. 21, 24-25), the models failed to account for the ‘significant’ amounts of radionuclides initially released — which were ‘orders of magnitude’ beyond predictions. In light of this, it’s worth reviewing the response of nuclear power advocates to Wotawa’s underestimates.”

Read: 8 Signs that Fukushima Radiation is Blasting the Oceans and the U.S.

Of course, there are people who said these claims were alarmist or over-stated, like Jan Zeman of Brookhaven National Lab.

In response to Wotowa’s claims, Zeman said:

“Wotawa’s claims are overstatements possibly multiple orders of magnitude higher than the actual reality. This is especially embarrassing as he works for CTBTO… popular “science” journals in USA [have bought] into such ‘ideas’, because the sensationalism is still extremely high there… [These] most probably startlingly incorrect conclusions [were] presumably designed not just to get media attention and scare the traditional Austrian antinuclear activists, but whole the world…

The Cs-137 nuclei… is the most dangerous fission contaminant… it has very high gamma decay energy [and] high affinity to soil [as well as] living organisms… Chernobyl disaster emitted ~36.9 kilograms of Cs-137…Wotawa wants us to believe that almost half of this amount (17.4 kg) of Cs-137, was released into the environment at Fukushima in just one day… Everybody would have problems surviving even just hours in the [plant’s] immediate surroundings…

[There’d also be] many hundreds of kilograms of [radionuclides such as] Sr-90… Zr-95, Np-239, Mo-99, Ce-141, Ce-144… and many other fission products!… the overheated but intact reactors [note: all 3 not intact] in the intact containments [note: all 3 containments are not intact] were vented [note: venting was unsuccessful] through the pressure suppression chamber water [note: suppression chambers failed]…

Three Mile Island accident [is what to compare this to] – as is done by those, who are not so zonked by their greatness… [T]he water is… not spreading far [note: it’s spreading across entire N. Pacific, and beyond], is relatively contained [note: Tepco:,’It’s not under control’] in the underground trench and can be pumped out [note: ‘pumping it out of tunnels will not work’]… and then decontaminated [note: ‘impossible to remove hundreds of radioactive materials’]… Mr. Wotawa’s figures… would be immediately dangerous to life… I think the likely orders of magnitude overstated conclusions of the CTBTO employee can serve as the example of the antinuclear exaggerations.”

In a document compiled by the U.S. Dept. of Commerce, NOAA, National Weather Service, titled, “Ocean Plume Modeling for the Fukushima Daiichi Event,” these estimates of possible contamination were given:

• Coastal releases ignored. According to TEPCO estimates, coastal releases are 1% of atmospheric releases… Not important for far-field estimates (i.e., exposure for US territories)
• Scenarios used [are] NRC source scenario [and] DOE Supercore source scenario
• Regarding Cs-137 release estimates, “NRC and DOE differ by three orders of magnitude” [i.e. DOE estimate is 1,000 to 9,999 times more than NRC]
• Enormous uncertainty in total amount of contamination released at FDNPP
• Whereas the large differences between the NRC and DOE sources are crippling from a scientific perspective, they proved useful from the perspective of decision making…
• DOE much too high at… JAMSTEC observation line 30km offshore [and] overestimates Cs-137 by order of magnitude [predicting a] maxima of around 100 Bq/L for Cs-137… JAMSTEC realistic contamination levels would be factor 10 smaller (10 Bq/L).”

No Radiation Found in Kelp Samples Tested

Earlier in 2014, a program called Kelp Watch 2014 promised that 19 academic and government institutions would take part in measuring California’s sea kelp beds.

The scientists said that of all the kelp tested, no radiation was found.

“Our data does not show the presence of Fukushima radioisotopes in West Coast giant kelp or bull kelp,” Manley said. “These results should reassure the public that our coastline is safe, and that we are monitoring it for these materials. At the same time, these results provide us with a baseline for which we can compare samples gathered later in the year.”

While these scientists sound credible, there were other reports coming in from different agencies that told a different story.

It is interesting, especially considering no federal agency was measuring levels at all – or at least they weren’t telling us about it. 

Ken Buesseler, chemical oceanographer from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, said:

“I’m not trying to be alarmist. We can make predictions, we can do models. But unless you have results, how will we know it’s safe?”

The samples used by Kelp Watch 2014 were taken from specimens primarily collected from February 24 through March 14.

Is it possible that these kelp samples have not yet accumulated radiation or we are just ‘safe’ as the experts suggest?

Furthermore, a report presented at a conference of the American Geophysical Union’s Ocean Sciences Section showed that some Cesium 134 has already arrived in Canada, in the Gulf of Alaska area. Radioactive Cesium has varying half lives, from 2.06 years to 2.3 million years.

A nuclear engineer has also reported that radiation levels were much higher in the ‘plume’ headed our way from Fukushima, and other isotopes besides Cesium were a concern.

In a broadcast on NPR, Dan Madigan, an adjunct assistant professor Stony Brook University, said:

“The models that predict the spread across the Pacific Ocean reaching the Eastern Pacific at some certain time is pretty much totally agreed upon, as in some amount of radioactive cesium and potentially other isotopes will cross the Pacific Ocean. The question is in the amounts. […] I want to point out I’m not saying that, or suggesting that, it won’t necessarily be problematic at all. But so far, all the information that’s been put forth has suggested that — I think a lot of people don’t know — in many ways this is a unique thing to happen to the Pacific Ocean, so people weren’t sure what they’d measure.”

An engineer from the Union of Concerned Scientists spoke similarly of current concerns about radiation bleed from Fukushima:

“. . . That’s true. I think what you’re seeing is the computer models assume that radiation particles are uniformly distributed in the air or water and therefore get transported across US shores. In reality there are particles that are not broken up evenly. It’s not like sugar dissolving in water. It’s more like particles that are suspended in water, and also there’s particles in the air, that cause local hotspots or high readings — much higher than the overall plume which seems a much more homogenous or uniform mixing. The computer models are good but they don’t account for the hotspots that people sometimes detect.”

The Fukushima incident still has not been fully cleaned or contained.

Additional Sources:

[1] Sputnik News

International Business Times