nuclear-news

Radiation testing of sockeye salmon a wise precaution

The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in northeastern Japan failed following the earthquake and tsunami that hit the country in March. The power company which owns the reactor said highly radioactive water (about 100,000 times the normal level) from the reactor had leaked into a trench, contaminating nearby water and the air.

“The monitoring of fish off the coast of B.C. is part of a series of measures intended to monitor the impact, if any, of the nuclear crisis in Japan,” Alice D’Anjou, a spokeswoman for the CFIA, told Postmedia News in an email. The agency does not expect to find harmful levels of radiation in the fish, D’Anjou said.

“If it’s sockeye (salmon), then it’s a wise precaution,” said fisheries oceanographer Tony Pitcher from the University of British Columbia. Sockeye salmon migrate quite far north and west in the Pacific Ocean into waters that are also crossed by currents coming from Japan, Pitcher said, so there is a chance the salmon will come into contact with organisms carrying some radiation.

Whether the salmon are affected by the radiation depends on what the salmon eat, Pitcher said, and also on the half-life of the particular radioactive isotope that entered the food chain from the reactor.

Pitcher said it is not likely the fish will reveal contamination, but it is important to test them and rule out the possibility. Other salmon species such as Koho and pink salmon do not migrate as far as sockeye and spend less time at sea, he said, so they are much less likely to be affected by the reactor failure.

http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/CFIA+test+salmon+radiation+from+Japanese+nuclear+reactor/5280582/story.html

August 22, 2011 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | general