A study conducted at Oregon State University has found that tuna caught off the Oregon shore after the Fukushima nuclear power station was destroyed in the 2011 earthquake and tsunami had only trace levels of radiation. There are many conspiracy theories going around about how all the seafood in the Pacific is now contaminated because of the nuclear meltdown. The study is published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology. A year of eating albacore tuna with this level of cesium is "about the same dose of radiation as you get from spending 23 seconds in a stuffy basement from radon gas," according to Delvan Neville, a graduate student at the Department of Nuclear Engineering and Radiation Health Physics at the university and lead author on the study. "It's just not much at … [Read more...]

Health officials in Hong Kong discovered low levels of Cesium in samples of oatmeal imported from Japan but have declared that there is no risk involved with consuming the product as the levels are not considered dangerous. Even if Hong Kong residents were to consume large amounts of the oatmeal, there would be no adverse effects, officials said, and so the suprmarket was not ordered to issue a recall. "The internal dose of radioactive substances of high consumers from consuming the oats sample for one year is approximately 0.003 millisievert (mSv), far less than the radiation dose received during a chest X-ray examination (about 0.05 mSv)," a spokesman for the Centre for Food Safety (CFS) of the Food and Environmental Hygiene Department said. CFS has been conducting radiation … [Read more...]