April 2015, 2017 “My latest concern is shifting, as the exposure for cesium has gone down 10,000 times, but it has stayed pretty constant for strontium-90,” said Ken Buesseler, a Woods Hole senior scientist specializing in marine chemistry and geochemistry who has been tracking the (North Pacific Ocean) radiation.
Strontium-90 is a byproduct of nuclear fission and behaves more like calcium than salt, embedding itself in bones, and can take two years rather than two months to pass through the body. While strontium isn’t currently heavily present in the ocean there are thousands of tons of it in the contamination in the tanks at Fukushima, and it’s very, very hard to clean up.
“150 million gallons have been collected in tanks, and it’s all very, very high in strontium-90,” he says. “There’s a hundred times more in the tanks than was ever released. It’s more dangerous and there’s more of it there.”
For their part the Japanese cleanup teams are working at containing it. “They’re trying to clean it up,” Buesseler says, a little doubtful. “They have every intention of cleaning it up, but they haven’t proven they can do it on this scale. I can do it in the lab on a five-gallon scale. They’ve got to process 300 tons per day, and 150 million already collected. That will take a long time. Any sort of new earthquakes or disasters,” Buesseler thinks, could spell trouble.
Here’s another thing that has him worried, and it’s not a chemical compound—it’s the lack of any government oversight whatsoever.
“The U.S. government has failed us because they don’t analyze ocean waters for radioactivity. Once it gets salty, the ground water gets to the ocean, they don’t study it anymore. The EPA studies our drinking water and the air we breathe, but not ocean water. So I’m for crowdfunding because there’s no one to go to. It’s crazy. It’s in the U.S. national interest to have these types of measurements, and I’ve told them, but no agency is stepping up to the plate.” Buesseler thinks he knows the answer: the Department of Energy.
“The Department of Energy used to study the fate of weapons testing fallout in the ocean. They still have responsibility for testing in the Marshall Islands. The DOE has a historical responsibility for this because they have the expertise. They have the tools to do this. They have very unique facilities. NOAA doesn’t have that. This is a DOE fit. They’ve shied away from the oceans for 20 to 30 years for political reasons.”
And for those quick to dismiss the importance of checking our oceans for radioactivity, remember this: everything is radioactive. Everything.
“We live in a radioactive world. Some say we shouldn’t have cesium in the fish, but there’s already cesium in the fish,” he says, laughing. “How much more did Fukushima add? What other isotopes are already in the fish? Don’t worry about the cesium, because there are other things in much higher amounts.” https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-radioactive-is-the-pacific-really
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1-4-2018
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