FUKUSHIMA, FISHING DISASTER AND BIOMAGNIFICATION IN THE PACIFIC

FUKUSHIMA: FISHERY DISASTER IN PACIFIC
Lax government oversight, a too cozy relationship between the Japanese government and the nuclear power industry, and Ayn Randian style greed by Tepco the Japanese company which operates the plants, mixed with a Pacific Tsunami in 2011 to cause the nuclear disaster we know now as Fukushima Daiichi. But less is known of the fishery disaster in the Pacific that the world will have to suffer with for the next century or longer. One billion people on the Pacific Rim who depend on food from the sea will have to face the choice of going hungry, or eating radioactive contaminated fish. The key reason for the disaster: the natural process of bioconcentration in which even very minuscule levels of contaminates in the water column can be concentrated many thousands of times in the bodies of fish and plankton in the marine food chain culminate in very high levels in the top predator fish. As a result the nuclides the Japanese have permitted to seep into the Pacific will be spread far and wide over the vast Pacific, reaching the US west coast in 2017. But fish and plankton will be concentrating even low level nuclear contaminants in the top predator fish to dangerous levels before that. As a result we can expect the levels of radioactivity to INCREASE in the predator fish we favor as food over time, not decrease as we move away in time from the 2011 event.

Yesterday I came across a startling report in Le Monde. On July 10, 2013, the French daily reported that Tepco, the Japanese company which owns and operates the crippled Fukusima power plant in northern Japan, revealed a strikingincrease in levels of radioactive caesium in groundwater-monitoring wells situated between the plant and the Pacific Ocean. In three days the level of the element caesium surged to ninety times the level it had been. The information just confirmed what many have suspected, that the plant is still out of control and leaking high levels of nuclear waste into the soil below the plant and that that highly contaminated water is seeping directly into the Pacific Ocean. See extract of original article: " Japon- Fuite d'eau contaminée à Fukushima", Le Monde, July 10, 2013.

Studies estimate that the world value of wild fish landed as a result of ocean fishing is in the order of $80 billion dollars annually and more than 50% of that is from the Pacific Ocean, while the total,value in terms of jobs, supporting industries, refrigeration, boat building, tin mining ( for canned fish) packaging, transporting, and selling the fish amount to more than three times the landed value or about $240 billion dollars. (Dyck, A.J. and U.R. Sumaila. 2010. Economic impact of ocean fish populations in the global fishery. Journal of Bioeconomics. ). The Wild Salmon Center estimates that just one "species" of fish, the wild Pacific salmon, sustain a $3 billion-a-year industry and provide tens of thousands of jobs, and serve as a protein staple to millions of people in Russia, Japan, Canada and the US. The State of Alaska estimates that its Pacific fishery supports about 80,000 jobs in that state and accounts for some $6 billion dollars in revenue. Fish provide an excellent and in some nations essential source of protein to billions of people world wide. China with its 1.3 billion population harvests about 14 million tons of wild marine fish from the Pacific annually which supplements the nutrition of its citizenry. Russia harvests about 3 million tons of marine fish from this same region. While the USA takes about 5 million tons. Of that more than 50% of all U.S. landings were fish caught by trawlers in the Pacific Ocean. The Pacific Ocean catch includes groundfish such as Pacific cod, flounders, hake, ocean perch, Alaska pollock, and rockfishes. Other important commercial Pacific Ocean species are salmon, halibut, Dungeness, King and Snow crab, tuna, and squid. But since the Fukushima disaster all of these species may be found to be too contaminated to be eaten safely. That spells an economic disaster and a nutritional disaster just over the horizon.

It is now about sixteen months since the tsunami and melt down of the reactors at Fukushima and reports such as that of the Le Monde piece above are the few notices of trouble over the horizon available for concerned citizens. Our press has basically ignored this issue. Reports in some Canadian journals indicate that the fish monitored for radioactivity are showing signs of having higher radiation levels in 2012 and more recently, than in the time period closer to the disaster. That is in part an indication that the plant is still dumping contaminated water into the Pacific, but of more concern is that the levels of nuclides are increasing in the top levels of the food chain more as a result of bioconcentration. The press and other media are silent on this quiet disaster. They do not want to be blacklisted by any big industry which might quit buying advertisement space. So we must ferret out the facts and come to our own conclusions.

What we do know is that caesium 137 and caesium 134 are man-made radioactive elements which were and are continuing to be released into the Pacific Ocean at Fukushima. Ocean currents carry these materials out into the Pacific where they mix with uncontaminated water. Marine scientists have found these elements from Fuskushima thousands of miles away from the plant site and thousands of feet deep in the water column. They are absorbed or ingested by filter feeding plankton and in that way get into the food chain. These substances emit dangerous radiation which, when ingested by humans, spread over the body and concentrate in the soft tissues. In high enough concentrations they kill outright. In lower dosages they will produce cancers. The substances stay dangerously radioactive for decades. (This element has a half life of about thirty years, meaning that one half of its nuclei decay away to a stable element over a period of thirty years, over the next thirty years one-half of the remaining half decays away. So after sixty years, one fourth of the original amount is still there emitting radiation, and over the next thirty years a half of that (or 1/8 of the original) decays away.....et cetera). Once ingested these elements remain in the human body for several months. There is no special threshold below which these substances are benign. No levels of radiation are "acceptable".

We must avoid them and avoid having our children and pregnant women from ingesting them.

Our fish mongers are eager to sell product (and may unknowingly or otherwise mis-label products that they want to sell). So do not depend on the fish being labeled as radioactive or removed from sale. Unfortunately, we can not expect to receive any meaningful warnings from our government. Let us be clear. Our government (a government for the oligarchs and by the oligarchs) has as its most vital concern the viability and continued profitability and survival of the fishing and other industries associated with this quarter of a trillion dollar part of the world economy. They are not concerned with the possible health problems, cancers, suffering, and early deaths of it citizenry. That is a gradual process that politicians can easily ignore or sweep under the rug, and which will take decades to expose...and document. And you can be sure that the big banks, US state governments, foreign nations, and various companies with stakes in the fishing industry will lie, hide evidence, and distort the facts to protect those industries, as did the tobacco industry, in league with several US governments of both parties for some thirty years or more, to hide the truth regarding the dangers of smoking.

So begin tapering off your taste for tuna sushi, for Chilean Sea Bass, for Pacific cod, and Alaskan salmon and for a host of other Pacific wild fish. No one will tell you how radioactive they are. You can thank the nuclear power industry, General Electric who designed and built those plants, Tepco in Japan who mis handled the disaster, the Japanese government who failed to regulate the industry, and the government agencies which promoted and continue to promote the most dangerous way to boil water and generate electricity every imagined.

Get the picture?

rjk