Friday, Jan 10th
Last update12:38:46 AM GMT
Environmental Glance
Pacific bluefin tuna migrating last year from coastal Japan to the waters off Southern California contained radioactive cesium isotopes from the Fukushima nuclear disaster, scientists reported Monday.
“The tuna packaged it up and brought it across the world’s largest ocean,” said marine ecologist Daniel Madigan at Stanford University, who led the study team. “We were definitely surprised to see it at all and even more surprised to see it in every one we measured.”
"We were frankly kind of startled," said Nicholas Fisher, one of the researchers reporting the findings online Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Florida's top state wetlands expert has been suspended after she refused to issue a permit on a controversial project — one that she said her boss was willing to bend the rules to approve.
The project: turning a North Florida pine plantation into a business that attempts to make up for wetlands that are wiped out by new roads and development. At stake: millions of dollars in wetland "credits" that can be sold to government and developers.
Fourteen months after the accident, a pool brimming with used fuel rods and filled with vast quantities of radioactive cesium still sits on the top floor of a heavily damaged reactor building, covered only with plastic.
The public’s fears about the pool have grown in recent months as some scientists have warned that it has the most potential for setting off a new catastrophe, now that the three nuclear reactors that suffered meltdowns are in a more stable state, and as frequent quakes continue to rattle the region.
It's not just Fukushima, though that may be enough. The northern hemisphere especially had been inundated with radioactive fallout by atmospheric nuclear weapons testing from 1950 to 1963. The Nevada testing area alone produced 1200 nuclear explosions that emitted radioactive particles across the USA.
The Chernobyl incident in 1986 affected hundreds of thousands throughout Europe, Scandinavia, and Russia. The boom in nuclear reactor power plants had already started and was constantly increasing, along with considerable radiation leaking.
The operator, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, said the meltdowns it believes took place at three reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant released about 900,000 terabecquerels of radioactive substances into the air during March 2011. The accident, which followed an earthquake and a tsunami, occurred on March 11.
This media silence is a devastating one—so much so that if described properly it would curdle one’s soul. It is so disgusting that the only image that compares is the Nazi gas chamber, but this one is big enough for 40 million people.
The issue of planetary contamination is more important than the economic crisis the media is covering, which threatens to go into its own kind of meltdown.
Things are so bad at Fukushima that, “Humans cannot come close to certain parts of the reactor site and even robots get fried. They’re delicate machinery; their micro-circuitry cannot withstand the intense bombardment of radiation,” reports Kaku.
Page 107 of 203
