Tuna caught near California still have traces of Fukushima radiation

Almost two years after a natural disaster ravaged a Japanese nuclear plant, Bluefin tuna that test positive for radiation poisoning continue to be caught off the coast of California.

Twenty-three months after a tsunami took the Fukushima power plant offline and triggered an international emergency, the effects of the disaster are still being felt thousands of miles apart. This week writer Monte Burke of Forbes draws attention to a new study that shows the lingering damages caused nearly two years ago.

Burke says that a new study from Daniel J. Madigan of Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station suggests that even waters in the East Pacific aren’t safe from the radiation. Bluefin off the coast of Japan are still showing signs of contamination almost two years after the incident, and migration patterns suggest that fish floundering near the other side of the ocean will continue to show evidence of radiation. And because relatively young Bluefin may have spent the majority of their lives in radioactive ocean waters near Japan, even infant fish are testing positive for radiation all this time later.

This isn’t likely to be ending anytime soon, either: Burke acknowledges that the plant is still leaking radiation into the ocean, which doesn’t necessarily just disappear. Just last month, a murasoi fish was caught in the vicinity of the Fukushima plant that tested to have around 2,540 times Japan's legal limit for radiation in seafood.

Stanford’s Madigan tells Burke that radiation within the tuna is excreted over time as well, so that the contaminants are continuously added into the ocean waters.

Read on:  http://rt.com/usa/tuna-fukushima-radiation-238/

Bird numbers plummet around stricken Fukushima plant

Researchers working around Japan's disabled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant say bird populations there have begun to dwindle, in what may be a chilling harbinger of the impact of radioactive fallout on local life.

In the first major study of the impact of the world's worst nuclear crisis in 25 years, the researchers, from Japan, the US and Denmark, said their analysis of 14 species of bird common to Fukushima and Chernobyl, the Ukrainian city which suffered a similar nuclear meltdown, showed the effect on abundance is worse in the Japanese disaster zone.

The study, published next week in the journal Environmental Pollution, suggests that its findings demonstrate "an immediate negative consequence of radiation for birds during the main breeding season [of] March [to] July".

Two of the study's authors have spent years working in the irradiated 2,850 sq metre zone around the Chernobyl single-reactor plant, which exploded in 1986 and showered much of Europe with caesium, strontium, plutonium and other radioactive toxins. A quarter of a century later, the region is almost devoid of people.

Timothy Mousseau and Anders Pape Moller say their research uncovered major negative effects among the bird population, including reductions in longevity and in male fertility, and birds with smaller brains.

Many species show "dramatically" elevated DNA mutation rates, developmental abnormalities and extinctions, they add, while insect life has been significantly reduced.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/bird-numbers-plummet-around-stricken-fukushima-plant-6348724.html