Are you a denier of Fukushima radiation in your seafood?

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Tools for Learning How Badly the Pacific Ocean is Fukushima-ed

Your Vital Choice When Shopping for Seafood: Trust Your Government or Trust Common Sense

Fukushima Radiation is Now in Wild-Caught North Pacific Seafood

Since Fukushima began melting down in March 2011, U.S. and Canadian authorities have done a wonderful job at protecting public safety. They averted panic, but they lied in doing so.

On March 17, 2011, mere days after hydrogen explosions were blasting apart reactor buildings and hot, melting fuel rods were steaming away gaseous forms of plutonium and cesium on Japan's northeast coast, President Barack Obama told Americans that "We do not expect harmful levels of radiation to reach the United States." But Obama was wrong. Airborne plumes from Fukushima contaminated grass all over the U.S. that was consumed by cows whose milk turned out to be surprisingly radioactive in at least one instance. In October 2011, the State of Kansas released data showing that a sample of milk that was produced six months prior from a dairy farm hit with a Fukushima plume was contaminated with radioactive iodine-131 at over 1,500 picocuries per liter, which may qualify as one of the most radioactive food items found in the U.S. breadbasket since the 1960s. (Kansas didn't alert the public and a paucity of additional sampling prohibits us from knowing the true peak contamination levels.)

U.S. federal and state officials in April 2011 made a similar blunder in announcing that it was very unlikely that Fukushima's aqueous plumes of deadly radioactivity will affect beaches or wild-caught fish in the North Pacific. Their argument was that any contamination will dilute because of the huge area of the ocean (and distance between the continents) and that migratory fish will excrete their toxins along the way. The U.S. FDA was so confident in its 'poop and dilute' model that it said in April 2011 that "no sampling or monitoring of [U.S.-caught] fish" in North Pacific waters was "necessary" on a one-time or ongoing basis.

This 'poop and dilute' camp is in denial of a couple of things. One, there is a thing called an ocean current that is sweeping radioactivity dumped at Fukushima eastwards, and ultimately towards coastlines and fishing waters of the U.S. and Canada. Two, there is a thing called bio-accumulation. If you see low levels of a chemical, like mercury, in the water, that doesn't mean the fish that live in that water have the same levels as the water. Big fish eat smaller fish, and even bigger fish eat those big fish, and the mercury keeps accumulating. Alaska's Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) actually knows this - they test wild-caught fish occasionally to see how much mercury is bioaccumulating through the food chain. But the DEC is in denial about Fukushima - the supposedly very low levels of contaminants in North Pacific waters from the ongoing nuclear accident doesn't mean the fish will have very low levels of contaminants too!

It is with no great pleasure that I believe and I have evidence to suggest that these authorities are dead wrong and deniers. I simply am concerned about the average person out there who might be at risk. So, here's the news. This past March, a laboratory in the U.S. tested some of the fish products of a U.S. seafood company and two North Pacific species were found to contain cesium-134. Cesium-134, which is an unstable, radioactive isotope, emits so-called gamma rays (which are like x-rays) and beta rays (which are stronger than gammas but less penetrating). These rays would 'ionize' you - meaning they would strip mass from cells in your bones and tissues. Cesium-134 has such a short half-life (just over 2 years) that scientists agree that when you find cesium-134 in the environment it is from FUKUSHIMA. This evidence is overwhelming proof that multiple radioactive chemicals from Fukushima are very likely making their way into fish that hang out in the North Pacific. How? When we deal with chemicals like mercury, if we find high levels of this heavy metal in a fish or food it is bad, but it doesn't usually mean that other heavy metals are present. When dealing with nuclear accidents and the type of contamination that is released, the opposite is true. If there's one Fukushima contaminant in your fish then there's a good chance that other radioisotopes leaked from Fukushima are in that fish as well. Since there are more than two hundred radioisotopes that are escaping every day into the environment at Fukushima, this is a very big concern. Consider that the lab tests were ordered by a company (Vital Choice) that only tested for three of these radioisotopes (cesium-134, cesium-137 and iodine-131).

So, what other radioisotopes from Fukushima in our Pacific Ocean should we be worried about? Strontium-89 and stronium-90. Both were created in Fukushima's reactors and both actually defy getting excreted by fish (or humans). The reason is they are mistaken as calcium and build quickly into bone. The reason why in the early 1960s John F. Kennedy signed the Partial Test Ban Treaty banning nuclear tests in air, sea and space is that U.S. milk supplies went largely UNMONITORED for strontium-90 in the 1950s until scientists started finding it embedded in children's teeth in St. Louis! Many Nobel Prize winning (and other) scientists said in the 1960s that if open-air nuclear tests were allowed to continue for many more years, the impacts on global public health would be disastrous.

Vital Choice is a U.S. mail-order company specializing in wild-caught seafood and has remarked that the levels found in its products are safe. (The cesium-134 was found in its wild Pacific albacore and halibut.¹) But the lab it contracted with was working with only a very small sample size - apparently one sample per wild product offering, which suggests that greater concentrations of radioactivity could be present in its and other company's wild-caught fish being sent to market.

So, you are probably asking: what levels of contamination would be dangerous? Well, as an illustration, the U.S. federal government would say that Vital Choice's cesium-contaminated tuna or halibut is at about 0.1% of the federal 'level of concern'. That sounds re-assuring but you should know that the U.S. government has a public safety policy that prefers to accept some cancer mortality and radiation-linked illness and death in exchange for not cleaning up or halting nuclear industrial pollution that causes radioactivity to enter our food supply.² Why is this so? Because the U.S. depends on many, many nuclear facilities across government (the Energy Department, the military, etc...) that routinely pollute the environment with radioactive chemicals. The federal phrase 'level of concern' reflects a sort of compromise (and a twisted one at that). The compromise is that we can't have a threshold level of artificially-produced radiation so low in our foods that it shuts down a whole lot of government nuclear facilities and operations that dump radioactive waste into our air and waterways, and we can't have a threshold so high that people are going to be running to emergency rooms with radiation burns and vomiting, so we are going to have a 'level of concern.' Whether you're happy about it or not, that is a level that reflects concern for both your health and nuclear America.

So the FDA would say that Vital Choice's fish is safe. But what the FDA won't say is that they would let food items into the marketplace with really, really high contamination levels so that by the end of twelve months many groups of people would receive the equivalent of a 5-fold increase in their yearly natural background radiation exposure - and that is for just one group of radioactive isotopes. So, if the 'cesium' and the 'strontium' and the 'iodine' groups were all very near FDA 'levels of concern' over 12 months, then many people will receive a 15-fold increase. In a group or population that is dosed in a day or a year with 5 times their annual natural background radiation dose, scientists say they will expect anywhere from 225 to 1,350 extra fatal cancers per million persons above the background level of cancers! ³ The true 'level of concern' in a land where the government is for the people is zero. The government and the nuclear industry sacrifices precious little in this compromise and any sane person should choose to eat rad-free if they could out of concern for just him or herself.

The issue of massive contamination to the Pacific Ocean is going to be paramount for years to come. No one has the foggiest clue how much leaked radiation is in the ocean and it only takes a tiny, tiny fraction of a gram of plutonium or strontium-90, etc... to induce cancer. The situation is made worse by the fact that the equipment used by TEPCO to decontaminate tainted water - that is undoubtedly leaking into the ocean - only gets rid of radioactive cesium; the strontium and plutonium, etc...are left unaltered. ⁴

We are again the abusee in a nuclear crisis. Every one of us - in America and most other places - has paid with our health for the nuclear mishaps of our governments. That's the way compromise between an abuser and an abusee works. In 20th and 21st century America, the abusees accept that because of radiation protection standards rigged to ensure the government feeds its nuclear addiction, some of the innocents will be getting cancer and birth defects. In return, though, the abusees expect honesty and transparency (and, of course, security provided by our robust nuclear umbrella). We, the abusees, expect that when radiation standards are surpassed, our government will let us know. But this just doesn't happen. How are we supposed to trust our government when it won't even take a single damn sample of seafood from the Pacific Ocean to even see its level of contamination?

'Poop and dilute' as a public health philosophy, come on!?

Friends, this is not about Fukushima. This is about some clause somewhere in the great documents signed by our founding fathers that says government is for the people. If our government is covering this all up, as I suspect, then they are not in it for us anymore. And Fukushima is the least of our problems.

The True Words About Fukushima We Never Heard

Fukushima happened because free citizens of the world forgot that people in a democracy have a duty, a sacred role, which is to prevent their government from ever turning against them and humanity. The founding fathers of our democracies tried to warn future generations that government is like a garden constantly under threat of invasive species. They bequeathed to us institutional powers and liberties that would be very useful to us, at the right times, to remove malignant roots growing in our government. But we failed to remain vigilant and cognizant of the everlasting threat of the tendency, as was seen in centuries past, of government to become corrupt. Had we been active in screening for and weeding out the harmful elements of our community garden, then the seeds of misinformation about radiation and nuclearism wouldn't have proliferated. The real problem isn't unsafe nuclear reactors or children in Fukushima City with thyroid nodules. It is that we have a destructive set of governments that has somehow allowed all of this to happen. And we have only ourselves to blame for this.

NUCLEAR AGE PRIMER

During the late 1950s and early 1960s the biggest-ever open-air nuclear explosions in human history, conducted by the U.S. and the Soviet Union, caused a type of worldwide 'nuclear autumn' as 'aged' radioactive fallout that fell from the stratosphere via large convection weather systems contaminated arable areas - and thus the global food supply - and led to the radiological poisoning of hundreds of millions of persons. The chief danger in this fallout was strontium-90, a chemical analog to calcium, which was scattered across the northern and southern hemispheres and made it into all living things.

An infant mortality - global fallout link? 'These observations indicate a common maternal-fetal cause such as an economic or environmental factor...[yet] there are no clear economic correlates...[and] no universal change in nutritional management of pregnant women is apparent...Among environmental factors is the rise in exposure to strontium-90 resulting from atmospheric weapons testing, which has been closely correlated, both geographically and temporarily, with excess fetal and infant deaths from 1950 to 1964....This and other hypotheses should be developed and tested to determine the cause of this important loss of life.'  'After 1951 in England and Wales mortality increased, reaching a maximum deviation from the previous exponential fall in 1967...The same general pattern occurred in the United States...[which] reached a maximum deviation from the previous exponential fall in 1966...' Sources: 'First Day Neonatal Mortality Since 1935: Re-Examination Of The Cross Hypothesis,' British Medical Journal, Vol. 304, No. 6823 (2/8/92), pp. 343-346 UNSCEAR report, 1967, Annex B, p. 59, Figure 24

This strontium-90 that still resides in the tissues and bones of all things is the root of our global cancer epidemic and a persistent menace behind many genetic, immunological and neurological disorders. Reputable scientists such as the late Linus Pauling and John Gofman have argued, using science and reason, that the death toll from this 'global fallout' will, at the minimum, fall within the range of a small holocaust.

Yet virtually no one is aware of this 'nuclear autumn' because study and knowledge of the biological effects of nuclear fallout on humans was born and shaped by the very powers that invented, brutally used and still rely on nuclear weapons. Simply put: the law-breaking bully volunteered to lead the criminal investigation that resulted in self-aquittal and global peoples let themselves become fooled by this corruption - this hijacking of science and justice.

It is as if we all agreed to believe that welts and bruises inflicted by our schoolyard bully caused no pain and that the bully plays a legitimate role in stabilizing a tenuous power structure of the playground. Yet we have all been harmed by this ill-made decision. Nuclear weapons have already caused a holocaust and our sanctioned nuclear bullies actually destabilize the world through their aggressive posturing.

Over 200 years ago, Thomas Jefferson suggested in one of the most important literary documents of modern time that if our government ever becomes destructive then her citizens must alter it or abolish it. Abolishment means we literally undo government and start anew.

Unfortunately, we don't have a lot of time to rectify ourselves and our governments. There are many, many nuclear 'time bombs' - aging reactors, as one example - around the world that can go off at any moment and no governmental body is doing anything about this - and no governmental body will do anything to help victims (locally or globally) when it happens.

This is where we are now in our nuclear age. We are a bunch of kids who are governing ourselves with knives and rumors. This is a situation no less unstable than a collapsing star.

I dedicate 'Nuclear Crimes-The Book' to the past, present and future radiation victims of the world in the hope that the slivers of truth I have found will set us free from this madness.

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