Little risk found in seafood after 2011 nuclear crisis

It’s OK to keep salivating over seafood.

A new study from an international research team has found that migratory marine predators in coastal waters near Japan and Hawaii had negligible contamination from the devastating 2011 earthquake and tsunami that caused a Fukushima power plant to release large quantities of radioactive material.

The team found no detectable levels of cesium-134 and cesium-137, isotopes formed when uranium breaks down in nuclear reactors, in a sampling of predatory fishes and other large vertebrates in waters near Japan, Hawaii and California between 2012 and 2015. That’s good since radioactive cesium can lead to cancer in humans.

The findings are published in a recent issue of the journal Environmental Science &Technology.

Scientists from Harvard University, William &Mary’s Virginia Institute of Marine Science, Stony Brook University, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center, the Channel Islands Cetacean Research Unit and Tokai University worked together to address public health concerns, which emerged in reaction to an earlier migratory pattern study. That study, which occurred shortly after the Fukushima disaster, showed elevated levels of radioactive cesium in bluefin and albacore tuna from the California coast.

“The earlier studies showed extremely low risks from cesium to anyone eating these migratory species, but public concern persisted,” Kevin Weng, an assistant professor at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, said in a statement. “That concern also expanded to include not only the species of tuna in which cesium had been measured, but to other fishes, marine mammals and sharks.”

Health concerns were raised about North Pacific salmon, halibut and scallops off British Columbia, and sea lions in Southern California, the study’s lead author, Daniel Madigan of Harvard, said in a statement.

“There was even information on the internet that ‘the Pacific is dead,’” Madigan said.

Last year, a study by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution detected radiation from Fukushima’s nuclear disaster in seawater samples from Tillamook Bay and Gold Beach in Oregon, but the levels were very low and not expected to put West Coast fish eaters or swimmers in harm’s way.

The latest study sought to put perceived risk in context by sampling a broader range of vertebrate species across the entire North Pacific.

Weng, who collected samples from Oahu’s waters during the latest study, said scientists discovered radioactivity from the Fukushima disaster is very low in open-ocean vertebrates.

“Go ahead and eat some sushi,” he advised.

The most current research shows that impacts to human health are likely to be negligible, Madigan said.

“For marketed fish to be restricted from trade, the cesium levels would have to be more than 1,600 times higher than in any samples we measured,” he said.