Fukushima Radiation Floods West Coast

Radioactive Nightmare


Government turns a blind eye as fallout from Fukushima heads our way
By Michael Collins 07/05/2012

"...The US Geological Survey (USGS) reported on Feb. 21 that Los Angeles had more cesium-137 fallout than any other region in the nation during the opening days of the disaster, from March 15 to April 5, 2011.


The amount of Cs-137 detected in precipitation at a monitoring station 20 miles east of downtown was 13 times the limit for the toxin in drinking water, according to a report obtained by the Pasadena Weekly.

USGS released another astonishing study Feb. 22, with data from measurements taken at its Bennington National Atmospheric Deposition Program in Vermont, confirming a grim cesium-137 scenario for Southern California.

“Deposition actually decreased as the air mass traveled east to west,” Greg Wetherbee, a chemist with USGS, told the Brattleboro Reformer newspaper.

“In the United States, cesium-134 and cesium-137 wet dispersion values were higher than for Chernobyl fallout, in part due to the US being further downwind,” Wetherbee told the paper. “With Chernobyl, there was more opportunity for plume dispersion.”

This double whammy of cesium-137, which has a half-life of 30 years, isn’t even in a uranium-60 buckyball. But they are both in the unfathomable spread of goo throughout the Pacific, riding on the second strongest current in the world and headed right for us.

The three reactor meltdowns have spewed trillions of becquerels of highly radioactive iodine-131, cesium-137, strontium-90 and plutonium-239 into the atmosphere and Pacific since March 11, 2011. The initial explosions and fires sent untold amounts of radiation high into the atmosphere.

A Feb. 28 report by the Meteorological Research Institute, just released at a scientific symposium in Tsukuba, Ibaraki Prefecture, Japan, says that 40,000 trillion becquerels, double the amount previously thought, have escaped from the Unit 1 reactor alone.

This has resulted in fallout around the globe that especially impacts the Pacific and parts of America and Canada — two countries downwind of Japan on the jet stream. British Columbia, the Pacific Northwest, Midwest and Ontario have been hit especially hard by rain, sleet and snow, in some cases with dizzying amounts of high radiation.

A March 6 Department of Biological Sciences study conducted at California State Long Beach found that kelp along the coast of California was heavily impacted by radioactive Iodine-131 one month after the meltdowns began. The virulent and deadly isotope was detected at 250 times levels the researchers said were normal in the kelp before the disaster.

Radioactive fallout in St. Louis, Mo., rainfall, which has been monitored at Potrblog.com since the crisis began, has been repeatedly so hot that levels have been reached that make it unsafe for children and pregnant women. An Oct.17, 2011, St. Louis rainstorm was measured on video at 2.76 millirems per hour, or more than 270 times background levels.

The main wave of water-borne radiation from the meltdowns, including highly mobile uranium-60 buckyballs, is surging across the Pacific along the Kuroshio Current, second only to the Gulf Stream for power on the planet.

Millions of tons of seawater and fresh water have been used to cool the melted cores and spent fuel rods, generating millions of tons of irradiated water. The Kuroshio Current is transporting a significant amount of this escaping radiation from Fukushima Daiichi across the Pacific toward the West Coast.

The 70-mile-wide current joins the North Pacific Current, moving eastward until it splits and flows southward along the California Current, which flows along the coast. The American government has done nothing to monitor the Pacific Ocean for over half a year, even though a Texas-sized sea of Japanese earthquake debris is already washing up on outlying Alaskan islands and is suspected to have already hit the West Coast, including California.

“In terms of the radiation, EPA is in charge of the radiation network for airborne radiation; it’s called RadNet,” EPA Region 9 Administrator Jared Blumenfeld said on Feb. 9, during a news conference about new ship sewage regulations. “And we have a very significant and comprehensive array of RadNet monitors along the, actually along the coast, but on land. We don’t have jurisdiction for looking at marine radiation. Perhaps NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) would be able to answer that question, but we don’t have data or monitor it.”

NOAA suspended testing in the Pacific for Fukushima radiation last summer after concluding that there wasn’t any radiation to be detected.