– Senior Scientist: Fukushima cores melted through the containment vessels — I’m very concerned about sea life on West Coast accumulating radioactive material; Some contamination will arrive in concentrated pockets (AUDIO) (ENENews, Jan 3, 2014):
The Smart Show, Dec. 23, 2013:
At 38:00 in
Steven Starr, Director of the Clinical Laboratory Science Program at the University of Missouri and a senior scientist at Physicians for Social Responsibility: I still marvel at the fact that they announced that everything was under control, that there was a cold shutdown at Fukushima about a year after the accident. After that, the corporate news essentially stopped — but in fact, they’ve got the cores melted through the containment vessels, and 300 to 600 tons of radioactive groundwater going into the Pacific every day.
At 47:30 in
Starr: I’m very concerned that this stuff is going to accumulate and concentrate in marine life. Since we really don’t have any kind of good screening process going on for the stuff, there’s a group Beyond Nuclear actually got a petition to try and change the existing standards to lower them greatly from the 1,200 Bq/kg that the US allows in for its foodstuffs. I read a very good study that was done at a big center in Australia and Spain. They predict that every cubic meter of water off the West Coast is going to have something like 10 to 20 atomic disintegrations per second from cesium in it over the next several years. That doesn’t sound like a lot I guess, but what we’ve also seen is that the stuff comes across the Pacific, some of it’s concentrated. It’s in pockets of it, the fish swim through that and they feed in it. It’s kind of a random process. […] It’s kind of a crap-shoot really.