Saving Seafood

A decade after Fukushima nuclear disaster, Alaska expands seafood monitoring

April 21, 2021 — State environmental regulators announced Monday they’re expanding radiation testing of commercially harvested Alaska seafood to include crab using a Gamma radiation detector at a state laboratory in Anchorage. That’s thanks to continued federal funding from the Food and Drug Administration.

A devastating earthquake and tsunami off the coast of Japan in 2011 killed tens of thousands and crippled the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant which released radioactive material into the air and ocean.

That led to global concern about the safety of Pacific seafood. Alaska began screening fish samples in 2014. It now routinely tests prime export products including Bristol Bay salmon and Bering Sea pollock to reassure consumers that Alaska seafood is safe.

“We have not detected any elevated levels that are deemed harmful for consumption or for the health of the animal,” Bob Gerlach told CoastAlaska.

He’s the state Department of Environmental Conservation’s chief veterinarian and runs Alaska’s seafood monitoring program. He says the agency is now finalizing plans to begin testing several species of crab to capture more of the complex marine food web.

Read the full story at KCAW

Normalcy returning to Fukushima fishery, but new reactor cooling water releases loom

February 2, 2021 — As the tenth anniversary of the East Japan earthquake, tsunami, and Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster approaches, fishery cooperatives in Fukushima Prefecture are making progress toward recovery by reopening damaged port cargo handling and auction buildings and sales outlets – even as new releases of cooling water from the crippled reactor appear imminent.

The 11 March, 2011, disaster resulted in fishing being banned in the prefecture due to radioactivity. Since then, the national government, in cooperation with the prefectural governments and fisheries cooperatives, has monitored radioactive materials in fish and fishery products. In trial fishing, the number of samples in which radioactive materials above the standard limits were detected decreased over time, and in marine species – for four years after June 2015 – there were no samples collected in Fukushima that exceeded the standard. A study performed in 2017 found that Fukushima Daiichi radiation was no longer a danger to seafood-eaters.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Japan’s seafood sector holds breath through advances and setbacks on Fukushima radiation

March 8, 2019 — On 13 February, a robot arm successfully picked up pebble-sized pieces of radioactive fuel at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant. The plant operator, Tokyo Electric Power (TEPCO), sent a remote-controlled probe to the bottom of the plant’s Number 2 reactor. It grasped five small pieces of debris from the fuel rods and lifted them a couple of inches.

The robot did not actually remove the fuel debris. This was just a test to see if it could be moved. The company plans to actually remove some fuel debris as a sample by March 2020. Robots have already been used to remotely observe the inside of the reactor. The purpose of the latest test was to see whether the fragile material would crumble when picked up. Actually removing the melted fuel is considered the most difficult part of the clean-up operation.

This marks a step forward in the clean-up, but setbacks continue and lingering problems remain. Just as the Japanese government was making a new push to ease import restrictions in Taiwan and Hong Kong, radioactive cesium above the legal limit was detected in a fish caught off Fukushima. And though scientists are gaining a better understanding of how radioactivity forms hotspots, a new release of stored radioactive cooling water appears unavoidable.

More than seven years after the accident, fear of radiation now poses a greater obstacle to the economic recovery of the region’s seafood industry than any actual physical damage. Several countries have put in place bans on Fukushima’s seafood as a preventative measure.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Japanese Animals Are Still Washing Up in America After The 2011 Tsunami

Plastics and metals have made it much easier for invasive species to raft across oceans.

September 29, 2017 — On March 11, 2011, an unprecedentedly powerful earthquake struck the Tōhoku region of Japan. It destroyed hundreds of thousands of buildings, wrecked the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, created a tsunami that reached 40 meters in height, and shifted the entire planet a few inches on its axis. But among these catastrophic consequences, there were also subtler ones. For example, the tsunami inundated a small blue-and-white fishing boat called the Sai-shou-maru, ripping it from its moorings and casting it out to sea.

The boat drifted eastward through the Pacific, never capsizing. Then, on March 22, 2013, a couple weeks after the two-year anniversary of the quake, it washed ashore on Long Beach, Washington. Its hull was encrusted with seaweed and barnacles, and one of its compartments was full of water. And living in that water were five striped beakfish. The fish were youngsters, just four inches long. They had probably been swept into the boat as larvae, and spent their entire lives growing up within this ersatz aquarium. For two years, the boat was their entire world.

Four of those fish were euthanized by the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, but the fifth—now known as the “tsunami fish” was relocated to Oregon’s Seaside Aquarium. Its story astonished John Chapman, an ecologist at Oregon State University who studies aquatic invasive species. Somehow, this coastal species had endured a two-year, 4,000-mile voyage across the open ocean, in the tiniest of living spaces. “We said this couldn’t happen,” Chapman told OregonLive. “And nature is like: Oh yes it can.”

Of late, nature has been saying that to Chapman a lot.

In the last five years, he and his colleagues have documented 634 pieces of debris that were swept away by the Tōhoku tsunami and eventually washed up on the coasts of North America. And it hasn’t stopped coming yet. Between them, these bits of ocean-hopping junk carried 289 species that are typically found along Japanese coasts—a vast horde of sponges, sea stars, sea anemones, mussels, limpets, barnacles, and fish.

Read the full story at The Atlantic

Study negates concerns regarding radioactivity in migratory seafood

September 5, 2017 — When the Fukushima power plant released large quantities of radioactive materials into nearby coastal waters following Japan’s massive 2011 earthquake and tsunami, it raised concerns as to whether eating contaminated seafood might impair human health—not just locally but across the Pacific.

A new study by an international research team shows that those concerns can now be laid to rest, at least for consumption of meat from migratory marine predators such as tuna, swordfish, and sharks.

The team focused on cesium, a silvery metal with a large number of radioactive isotopes. Two of these, 134Cs and 137Cs, form when uranium fuel breaks down in nuclear reactors. The cesium isotopes are of particular concern because they were discharged in large quantities following the disaster, exhibit relatively long half-lives (2.1 and 30 years respectively), and tend to accumulate in the muscle tissues that people like to eat.

However, the team’s sampling of tissues from predatory fishes and other large vertebrates collected across the northern Pacific between 2012 and 2015 revealed no detectable levels of 134Cs, and 137Cs concentrations that were generally consistent with background levels from aboveground nuclear testing during the 1940s and 50s. They collected the animals from waters near Japan, Hawaii, and California.

Read the full story at Phys.org