FYI.
– UC Berkeley Professor: California seeing Fukushima fallout won’t be a surprise — ‘Especially concerned’ after radioactive leaks at plant were admitted — “I’m not terribly confident in information Japan is sharing” (ENENews, Jan 19, 2014):
Eric Norman, a nuclear engineering professor at University of California Berkeley, Jan. 19, 2014: “There is no evidence of Fukushima fallout here in California and local fish are safe to eat but I won’t be surprised to see small amounts of Fukushima fallout in the Pacific in the future […] There is no systematic testing in the US of air, food, and water for radiation, continuous testing is needed” […] he is especially concerned since the Japanese government admitted in late July that more radioactive water has been coursing into the Pacific Ocean then they first had reported [… ] “I’m not terribly confident in the information Japan is sharing about the plant’s activities and clean up. That’s why it’s even more important now to advocate for continuous testing of air, food, and ocean water for radiation.”
Al Jazeera English, Jan. 19, 2014: Scientists are looking at various unusual occurrences of marine animals recently dying along the Pacific coast and research that shows low-level radioactivity in California fish. Since July, researchers at the University of California Santa Cruz have been seeing starfish along the northern California coastline with a disease that makes their arms fall off and they eventually die. It’s being called the sea star “wasting” disease […] “It is unlikely that it could be from Fukushima but we are not ruling it out,” said Pete Raimondi, Chair of the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department at UC Santa Cruz. Raimondi is investigating the sea star disease and says debris from the Fukushima disaster that has floated over to the California coast could have toxins or radioactive particles that may have affected the starfish […] from January to May 2013 more than 1400 starving sea lions washed up on the beaches of southern California […] NOAA is calling it an “unusual mortality event” and don’t know why it is happening. Also, unprecedented numbers of whales, dolphins, anchovies, and other marine animals have been seen closer to shore than ever before.