Everyone’s seen it by now: the plume of radiation, color-coded like an outbreak of tornados on the Weather Channel, surging from the ruined Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant straight across the Pacific Ocean towards the West Coast of the United States, right towards San Francisco, into the Golden Gate, and right into the piece of sashimi at the tip of your chopsticks.
Almost three years after the crippling earthquake, the situation in Japan is grim and the cleanup has been plagued with setbacks. To avoid the worst-case scenario of a total meltdown, the most heavily damaged reactor’s 1300 fuel rods have to be kept covered in water all the time. Since the building is damaged, radioactive water is leaking into the ground, continuously, so Tokyo Electric (TEPCO) pumps it out and stores it in hastily constructed tanks to avoid further contamination. But 200 to 400 tons of radioactive water enter the Pacific every day.
It is extremely perilous. Although close to two years old, the video of Australian physician and anti-nuclear activist Helen Caldicott’s terrifying explanation of a chain of events that would prompt her to “evacuate my family from Boston” resurfaces on Facebook from time to time. This past November Japanese-Canadian scientist David Suzuki essentially seconded her, noting that if another magnitude seven earthquake in Fukushima exposed the fuel rods, the meltdown would “decimate Japan” and lead to an evacuation of the Western United States.
Human catastrophe of this scale invites alarmism like nothing else could. It’s all too easy to fall prey to total paranoia as it is for Fukushima to fade into the background radiation – so to speak – of all the potentiallyapocalypticthings that are going on, everywhere, all the time. (As a side note, even if it were possible to evacuate the Western U.S. in a timely manner, it would not be possible to relocate 60 million Americans – plus their Canadian and Mexican equivalents, and any surviving Japanese – permanently and have life simply go on. So in a sense, even those dire statements are weirdly rosy.) At the present moment, though, it does seem that while the risk of global catastrophe is very real, and TEPCO’s secrecy and stupidity have elevated it further, there is reason for cautious optimism in the way the cleanup is actually proceeding, in spite of how the homeless are the ones bearing the brunt of it.
As with coverage of the Scandinavian tourists stranded after the 2004 earthquake-tsunami in Southeast Asia, the American media’s concern can appear disproportionately focused on our potential misfortune at the expense of the locals. Without discounting the danger that radiation poses, the fact is that life in the tsunami-ravaged coast of Japan is slowly returning to normal, although the reactor’s immediate vicinity remains off-limits to civilians. They can take years to manifest, but the lack of any cancer clusters in Japan to date should temper – but by no means invalidate – the fear-mongering brewing thousands of miles away.
In response to the guy who found high levels of radiation in Pacifica, SFist showed another animated map, depicting a sea-borne cloud of radiation migrating to California like a swarm of pixelated wasps before circling back towards Hawaii. Wherever it winds up, cesium’s half-life is 30 years, meaning a century will elapse before current concentrations decrease to one-eighth of what they are. Radiation will likely diffuse as the food web absorbs it. Although seafood will require periodic testing for years, the testing might be inconclusive, as has been the case in the Gulf of Mexico after the 2010 BP oil spill. It might be a good idea to limit sushi consumption, but it’s OK to swim at Baker Beach, if you can stand the cold.
Between acidification from absorbing some of the atmosphere’s greenhouse gases, the oxygen-free dead zones off of Oregon, the swirling field of flotsam that is theGreat Pacific Garbage Patch and now fresh jets of cesium-137, the ocean is taking a serious pounding. Beyond the scared-shitless factor, it’s also a major downer, making ecological achievements like San Francisco’s 80 percent waste diversion look pointless. Nor is Fukushima the first time cesium-137 has leaked into the water or the air. Althoughunseen on Earth before the nuclear age began, it’s been released with every nuclear test and any number of industrial accidents worldwide, including Chernobyl. Whether or not the Fukushima disaster leads to a rash of cancers around the Pacific Rim, we are certainly killing the planet.
Photo by marcus_jb1973