10,000 Dead Sea Lions Wash Up In California, Officials Announce Crisis

...no, it is not Fukushima.
And if it was, it would be traceable by the radioactive signature. Radiation poisoning cannot be hidden.

i have a home in southern Japan, so this is an issue i keep well informed about. Generally, the mass media spreads massive fear about the man-made disaster in Fukushima. However, there is good coverage if you look. Japan Times is a good source for info -- despite many claims that coverage is stifled within the country. Contrary, the Japanese know the dangers of radiation poisoning first hand. And if you have ever been to the Peace Park/AtomIc Bomb Museum in Hiroshima, you know very well that they take the issue most seriously.

Here are a few sources to show that the region of Tohoku (東北 -- literally the 'NorthEast') is doing fine. For the geographically enthused, this is the area above Tokyo city, at the top of the main island of Honshu, facing the Pacific Ocean.

First of all of the 20,000 dead (Including those still listed as missing), roughy 95 percent drowned. The fourth anniversary of the disaster was commemorated nation wide just a few weeks ago (March 11th); no modern buildings collapsed. No one died of radiation poisoning. And according to Scientific American, it is likely no one will die from radiation -- they actually list stress as a bigger concern. This article was written one year after tge disaster. From the piece: Richard Garfield, a professor of Clinical and International Nursing at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, goes a step further. "In terms of the health impact, the radiation is negligible," he says. "The radiation will cause very few, close to no deaths."

More: ...from presentations at the annual Ocean Sciences Meeting of the American Geophysical Union in Honolulu in late February 2014: "The amount of Fukushima radioactivity in this seawater is miniscule, about a Becquerel per cubic meter of water, or Bq/m3 of short-lived Cs-134, and poses no concern at all. And never will. By comparison, the EPA drinking water standard for its sister radionuclide, Cs-137, is about 7,400 Bq/m3, and for all radioactive materials is almost a million Bq/m3. ... This Fukushima rad-signature has already taken its seat alongside that left over from above-ground nuclear tests in the 1950s and 60s as a curious and interesting phenomenon we can use scientifically to track water and air circulation patterns, and to use in forensic oceanography. ... In fact, Fukushima’s rad-signature is so low that we need to separate the Cs-134 from the Cs-137 just to know it’s from Fukushima. Cs-134 has such a short half-life (2.1 years versus 30 years for Cs-137) that it has long decayed away from the old tests. The Cs-137 from Fukushima is so low it’s totally eclipsed by the leftover Cs-137 from the 50s and 60s." "...Of the man-made radionuclides, Cs-137 left over from old bomb testing dominates the radioactivity we see in water and soil. In seawater, Cs-137 concentrations average less than 2 Bq/m3. The primary source of Cs-137 is the historic above-ground nuclear weapons testing from the 1950s and 60s..."

i suggest you read the entire article at Forbes: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2014/03/16/radioactive-fukushima-waters-arrive-at-west-coast-of-america/ This data, by the way, is from the esteemed Woods Hole Oceanography Institutution. In fact, some months ago, one of Woods Hole scientists, Ken Buesseler, did an AMA on reddit. So here is a link to that for further edification:
The New Reddit Journal of Science: http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/2lusz5

"I’m Ken Buesseler, an oceanographer who studies marine radioactivity. I’ve been doing this since I was a graduate student, looking at plutonium in the Atlantic deposited from the atmospheric nuclear weapons testing that peaked in the early 1960’s. Then came Chernobyl in 1986, the year of my PhD, and that disaster brought us to study the Black Sea, which is connected by a river to the reactors and by fallout that reached that ocean in early May of that year. Fast forward 25 years and a career studying radioactive elements such as thorium that are naturally occurring in the ocean, and you reach March 11, 2011 the topic of this AMA."

More: ...from the generally excellent CBC in Canada comes the good news that Fukushima rice being sold again: http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/fukushima-rice-passes-radiation-tests-for-1st-time-since-disaster-1.2889588

As /u/moezilla succinctly puts it: "The fun part is japan is 100 becquerels to 1 kg of food here in north America we are at 1200 to every kg." So let the jokes roll, but the fact remains that food in America is 12 times more radioactive than anything sold in Japan -- including from Fukushima. And you can see the data on that suprising fact here at the Wall Street Journal: http://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-JRTB-11694

Fishing in the region reopened long ago.
http://thebreakthrough.org/index.php/issues/nuclear/five-surprising-public-health-facts-about-fukushima

And finally, a map of Japan showing radiation readings nation wide, updated regularly. http://jciv.iidj.net/map/

/r/worldnews Thread Parent Link - yournewswire.com