Toxic Sushi

Got food poisoning once after what we thought was a lovely meal in Los Angeles’ downtown Little Tokyo district – took me out for a very nasty three days – and we know about the potentially fatal dangers of eating an imperfectly carved piece of mega-expensive, mega-poisonous blowfish. We’ve known about those risks for quite a while. The new Neptune nasty “no,” however, seems to be the danger of eating “glow” fish… an apparently constant risk facing many in Japan who consume fish caught off the coastal waters near the nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant. The waters themselves show substantial dissipation of any nuclear threat; the fish, however, remain uncomfortably rich with radioactive cesium.

What radiation studies of this aquatic life illustrate is the long-term consequences of massive radiation leaks anywhere. Want a condo in Chernobyl? 80% of the radioactive effluents from the Fukushima disaster were released into the atmosphere or the neighboring waters. While the ocean currents have managed to dissipate the contamination of the water itself, large aggregations of radioactive cesium appear to have settled onto the ocean floor… and they’re not moving. It appears that this will be constant source of cesium contamination for a very long time to come. Yet small-scale fishing in the area has resumed, but perhaps this is an industry that will be banned from the area for time long past the life expectancy of anyone left on earth.

“But about 40 percent of fish caught off Fukushima and tested by the government still have too much cesium to be safe to eat under regulatory limits set by the Japanese government last year, said the article’s author, Ken O. Buesseler, a leading marine chemistry expert at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, who analyzed test results from the 12 months following the March 2011 disaster.

“Because cesium tends not to stay very long in the tissues of saltwater fish — and because high radiation levels have been detected most often in bottom-feeding fish — it is likely that fish are being newly contaminated by cesium on the seabed, Mr. Buesseler wrote in the Science article…  ‘The fact that many fish are just as contaminated today with cesium 134 and cesium 137 as they were more than one year ago implies that cesium is still being released into the food chain,’ Mr. Buesseler wrote. This kind of cesium has a half-life of 30 years, meaning that it falls off by half in radioactive intensity every 30 years. Given that, he said, ‘sediments would remain contaminated for decades to come.’” New York Times, October 25^th. Makes you want to wiggle your toes in that luscious sand, doesn’t it?

Some of the little finny guys have radiation contamination hundreds of times beyond what the Japanese government has declared as safe. With petroleum prices soaring, and notwithstanding climate change issues and the international standoff with Iran over whether their program is peaceful or not (having nuclear capacity at any level can hide military aspirations), alternative fuel sources are de rigueur these days. We’re facing increasing demands on non-fossil-fuel-based sources of electrical power, and with an upgrade in global infrastructure and growing populations, nuclear fuel remains very much in the center of it all.

Plants introduced decades ago just fall short, and the upgrades they need are both costly and sometimes dangerous to implement. However, if this energy source is going to stay with us, we need an equally strong commitment constantly to update and upgrade every existing facility with every new significant safety feature vetted by the best and brightest nuclear engineers. The cost of not implementing these changes is unthinkable.

I’m Peter Dekom, and technological solutions always require technological upgrades to maintain safety and effectiveness… it’s called “learning.”