August 29, 2013 — Let’s be clear: leaked radiation is bad. This is a problem that needs urgent, international attention. But at least for now, I’m happy to reassure Joe Romm and all the parents of Facebook: your fish are not glowing with Fukushima radiation. Eat up!
My wife woke up this morning and found a surprise on her Facebook page. According to one particular blog entry making the rounds among some of her friends, all of a sudden every fish in the Pacific Ocean was dangerously contaminated with radiation from the leaky reactors at Japan’s crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant.
The post’s sudden and dramatic insistence that fish are poison came hard on the heels of a random e-mail from an old college friend I hadn’t spoken to in nearly 20 years asking me if it was safe for a friend to travel to Hawaii with her kids. Since two times makes a trend, as a fisheries and ocean energy expert who works closely with NOAA and other ocean science organizations, I felt completely pantsed. How did the social media mother brigade get the jump on me? Are Alaskan wild salmon lovers like our own Joe Romm going to start finding three-eyed “Simpsons” fish on their plates? I downed my first cup of coffee and launched into some fact-checking.
The upshot? While at least 42 species of fish from the area immediately surrounding the crippled nuke plant remain too radioactive to be safe for consumption, and here in the U.S., some fish, most notably Pacific Bluefin tuna, have been found with trace amounts of radiation, the levels are well below what is considered harmful — less than the amount of naturally occluding radiation in every toddler’s staple fruit: the banana.
Read the full story at the Center for American Progress