Gojira no maguro?

[mithriltabby]

Today’s SF Chronicle has a story on the food safety implications of the Fukushima Dai-Ichi dump of radioactive water (article embargoed until Friday for non-subscribers):

“The radioactivity would go up the food chain and accumulate in the top-level predators,” said Dale Sweetnam, a senior marine biologist for the California Department of Fish and Game. “We don’t eat marine mammals, so there wouldn’t be a potential for human contact. Probably the top-level predator that we would eat would be the tunas, which migrate across the Pacific.”

If enough radiation starts showing up in bluefin tuna that the market for them goes away until enough half-lives have passed that they’re safe to eat again, that might actually save the species (which is currently being overfished). Chernobyl’s Exclusion Zone grew back so much that it’s now a wildlife sanctuary.

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[mithriltabby]

Joy. Radioactivity in sea by Japan plant millions of times too high:

The operator of Japan's stricken Fukushima nuclear plant said Tuesday that it had found radioactive iodine at 7.5 million times the legal limit in a seawater sample taken near the facility, and government officials imposed a new health limit for radioactivity in fish.

[mithriltabby]

Japan’s Radioactive Ocean is looking at how it’s spreading:

The good news is that the powerhouse of the Kuroshio Current—a humongous western boundary current like the Gulf Stream—appears to be forming a kind of firewall keeping the contamination away from Tokyo's coast and funneling it east.

[mithriltabby]

It’s safe to eat sushi in San Francisco.