But – I’m having a hard time throwing caution to the wind when it comes to Pacific seafood. I’ve got two very young kids, we love fish – is it really safe to feed them seafood that’s been swimming around in radioactive water runoff?
And with the Fukushima plant still spilling several hundred thousand tons of radioactive water into the ocean on a daily basis (are those figures accurate?), what’s the short and long term prognoses of pacific ocean seafood?
Not to be flip, but do you have any kind of an idea on just how staggeringly tiny “several hundred thousand tons” of radioactive water is in relation to the size of the Pacific ocean?
By the time that any radioactive particles from Fukushima make it to this side of the Pacific, they won’t be distinguishable from the other naturally occurring radioactive particles in seawater.
You did know that seawater has a natural 3 ppb uranium content, didn’t you? Or that there are thousands of tons of radioactive waste on the ocean floor from the US and Soviet Union up through the 1960s?
I’d imagine that apex predators who spent time eating stuff that grew near Fukushima, or food species that grew near Fukushima might accumulate some radioactivity, but that would only be true in the immediate area anyway. Dilution would probably take care of the rest.
Everything is radioactive. The house you live in is radioactive. So is the food you eat, the water you drink, and the air you breathe. You yourself are radioactive.
If someone tells you that Fukushima is still spilling radioactive water into the ocean, ignore them, because they aren’t telling you anything you don’t already know. The relevant question is never “Is this thing radioactive?”. The relevant question is always “How radioactive is this thing?”.
Keep in mind, too, that the Pacific Ocean is very, very large. Even if Fukushima were to spill a hundred thousand tons of pure plutonium into the ocean, it would make very little difference to someone off the coast of California.
If you have a granite counter top in your kitchen the odds are that it is considerably more radioactive than any Pacific seafood you might lay on top of it.