Contaminated Water from Fukushima Reaches US West Coast

Contaminated water from Fukushima has reached the United States.

Five years after the nuclear disaster at the Fukushima plant in Japan caused by a tsunami, which led to contaminated water leaking into the ocean, which it seems to have reached the shores of the west coast of the United States.

Seaborne radiation from the Fukushima disaster has been detected for the very first time near the US, by researchers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. They reported that a compound known as cesium-134, classified as the fingerprint of the Fukushima plant, was detected in the water retrieved from the Tillamook Bay and Gold Beach in the state of Oregon.

Woods Hole is part of a collaboration of scientific and non-profit organizations known as the Fukushima InFORM. This institution has monitored the course of the radiation plume from Fukushima as it made its way across the Pacific through the oceanic currents. To make matters worse, cesium-134 has also been detected in salmon from Canadian waters.

Researchers were quick to state that the levels of radiation detected in the water do not pose any danger to people or the environment. The levels of cesium-134 were very low and thus, unable to harm anyone who decides to take a swim in those waters or eat the sea life from the region. Scientists emphasized the fact that the radiation levels from a single X-ray are 1,000 times stronger than the radiation you would be subjected to if you swim every day for an entire year into the particular waters.

The same status also applies to the Canadian salmon, which the researchers involved with the InFORM project reported to have found in the Okanagan Lake. Despite testing positive for cesium-134, the levels are a thousand times lower than the standard set by Health Canada.

The Fukushima Dai-chi incident was the biggest nuclear disaster since Chernobyl and was caused by a 9.0 earthquake and the tsunami that followed it. Despite the dangers posed by the radiation, no direct casualty was ever discovered. However, the nuclear disaster led to an increase in cancer deaths in the following. The estimated number of deaths are between 130 and 640. A new report from 2015 revealed that 137 children from the region, were found to have thyroid cancer.

Image source: Flickr

Bio
Latest Posts

Karen Jackson

Karen Jackson has always been passionate about technology. All the way through high-school she immersed herself in computers and web-design. Her ambitious nature helped her become a pro in Adobe Photoshop only by watching online videos and working with the program herself. This is also the program that she mostly uses in the creation of websites at her work-place. Technological innovation and gadgets that push the boundaries of what we are comfortable with have always fascinated her, so expect to see some weird gadget reviews coming from her.