Radioactive traces from Fukushima pose no danger
‘ESSENTIALLY SAFE’: Sample collected near dock in Ucluelet in February contains ‘very tiny’ amount
Traces of radioactive isotopes from the Fukushima disaster have been detected on the B.C. shoreline, but the amounts are so tiny that they pose no danger to human health or marine ecosystems.
The contaminated sample was collected at a dock in Ucluelet on Feb. 19 and found to contain 1.5 Bequerels per cubic metre of Cesium-134, the isotope being used as a marker for radioactivity from the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant accident in Japan.
“Those units don’t mean very much to most people,” said Jay Cullen, a chemical oceanographer at the University of Victoria and a partner in the research.
“But for comparison, the maximum allowable concentration that we have in Canadian drinking water, that’s set by Health Canada, is 10,000 Bequerels per metre cubed.
“They’re very tiny. By any international standard or any Canadian standard, the amount of radioactivity that we’re seeing is essentially safe.”
The amount is so small, in fact, that a person who swam for six hours a day for a year in water that contained twice the level of Cesium-134 found in this sample would receive a radioactive dose less than one-thousandth that of a single dental X-ray.
The Ucluelet sample was collected as part of a crowd-funded program called Our Radioactive Ocean, set up by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in the U.S. to monitor the radioactive plume spreading eastward from Japan.
Canadian scientists first detected Fukushima radioactivity 1,500 kilometres west of B.C. in June 2012, more than a year after a huge earthquake triggered the tsunami that flooded the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plants.
Since then, a team led by oceanographer John Smith at Fisheries and Oceans Canada has been monitoring isotope levels and creating models to predict the amounts expected to hit the coast. So far, the news is good. “The prediction is that we will not approach levels that will present a danger to anybody’s health,” Cullen said, adding it’s unlikely that marine organisms will be at risk.
The next few months will be crucial for researchers.
While predictions about the movement of Fukushima radioactivity have been accurate so far, ocean circulation patterns near shore make it much more difficult to forecast exactly when and where contaminated water will reach land.
Cullen’s network of citizen scientist volunteers, Fukushima InFORM, is collecting samples at 14 coastal locations every month, and will post results on fukushimainform.ca as soon as they are available.