France's nuclear monitor said that the amount of cesium 137 that leaked into the Pacific from the Fukushima Daiichi disaster was the greatest single nuclear contamination of the sea ever seen.
On March the 11th, 2014, an earthquake with a magnitude level of 9 hit Fukushima, Japan, and triggered a 15-meter high tsunami, which disabled the cooling and power supply of three reactors and eventually the nuclear accident. 16000 people died and many people got sick from radiation. The radiation however is not only affecting Japan: Sea-water was and is still pumped into the reactors to keep them stable. According to the website livescience, 5000 to 15000 becquerels of radioactive material have reached the ocean and in 2013, due to a leak in a storage tank, 300 tons of contaminated water leaked out.
Recently traces of cesium-134 and cesium-137 turned up in samples collected near Vancouver Island in British Columbia. The samples collected were separate from the monitoring project set up by IAEA but it is thought the only possible source of these radioactive elements is Fukushima!
But in the same time we have the Runit Dome in the Marshall Islands, a hulking legacy of years of US nuclear testing. Now locals and scientists are warning that rising sea levels caused by climate change could cause 73,000 cubic meters of debris to spill into the ocean, including Plutonium-239, the fissile isotope used in nuclear warheads, which has a half-life of 24,000 years.
Runit (or Cactus) dome was used for Cold War nuclear testing by the US government for 10 years from 1948. There were 42 tests in total on Enewetak Atoll, including 22 explosions on platforms, barges and underwater in the space of just three months in 1958.
Analysis of the results shows that the Pacific Bluefin Tuna will experience a steeper population decline in the short term compared to its expected population decline. Same for the Pacific Pink Salmon, radioactive effluent will result in a marked and lasting decrease in population.
We cannot change what has happened, but we can do the best thing we can to better the situation and to prevent it from happening again. The nuclear crisis continues out in the Pacific.
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