
Amid anti-nuclear protests early this month, Japan restarted its first nuclear reactor since the Fukushima disaster in March 2011. Despite strong opposition, including from former Prime Minister Naoto Kan, Kyushu Electric Power put one of the two reactors at its Sendai facility along the nation's southwestern coast back online. The second is scheduled to restart in October.
In the face of opinion polls showing most voters oppose restarting the country's nuclear power generation, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe argued that it is not economically feasible to keep importing foreign oil and natural gas and that the nation's increasing dependence on thermal energy threatens greenhouse gas emission reduction goals.
How Worried Should We Be About Nuclear Fallout from Fukushima? http://t.co/p36iWCzhE1 pic.twitter.com/J8uqYAJ2Bb
— The Mass Deception (@MassDeception1) August 23, 2015
But as Japan's concerns about its nuclear future grip the nation, North America continues to worry about the ongoing fallout caused by the Fukushima meltdown as ocean currents carry radioactivity to the western coasts of Canada and the U.S.
Ethan Stewart, a reporter for the Santa Barbara Independent, wrote about the "drumbeat of terror" that gripped California in early 2014:
"The panic started sometime after the New Year. It found its way to my inbox and my Twitter feed, took up residence on my Facebook wall and dominated conversations with friends and colleagues. I read reports titled 'Holy Fukushima—Radiation Already Killing North Americans' and '28 Signs That the West Coast Is Being Absolutely Fried with Nuclear Radiation from Fukushima' and 'The Worldwide Nuclear Crisis That No One Is Talking About.' These were no-holds-barred declarations that Japan’s Fukushima nuclear disaster was now a threat to life as we know it here on the West Coast."
But scientists who have analyzed the effects of the nuclear fallout in North America have found precious little to fret about. A month after the disaster, kelp beds off the California coast were contaminated with the short-lived iodine-131, a radioactive isotope with an 8-day half-life.
"Kelp forests are some of the most productive ecosystems on Earth," said Steven Manley, a biologist and kelp expert at the California State University at Long Beach. "One thing about [kelp] is it has a large surface canopy," he said, pointing to the fact that because it is always exposed to air, kelp absorbs all the various contaminants in the air. Though Manley said that the presence in the marine environment of iodine-131, a product of nuclear fission that is not found in nature, "was significant," he added that "it's definitely not harmful to humans."
In June 2012, two radioactive isotopes, cesium-134 (with a half-life of two years) and cesium-137 (with a half-life of 30 years), were detected in the seawater at a location some 1500 km (930 miles) west of British Columbia, according to a study published in December and conducted by scientists from the University of Rhode Island and Canada's Department of Fisheries and Oceans. Cesium isotopes have been released into the atmosphere ever since nuclear testing began in 1945. Today, it is a component of radioactive fallout.
By June 2013, the "Fukushima signal," as it is known, had reached the Canadian continental shelf. By February of this year, the signal had increased to a value of 2 Becquerels (Bq) per cubic meter throughout the upper 150 meters (500 feet) of the water column. The study's authors said that the increase resulted in "an overall doubling of the fallout background from atmospheric nuclear weapons tests."
Global cesium-137 levels, pre-Fukushima. Photo credit: Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
While "doubling of the fallout background" may sound somewhat ominous, 2 Bq per cubic meter is a tiny amount of radiation. Ken Buesseler, an oceanographer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, put it into perspective in a Reddit AMA last fall. He said that if you went swimming in a part of the Pacific Ocean that had 10 Bqs per cubic meter of cesium-134 or 137, you could swim six hours day, 365 days a year and still only get a radioactive dose that was "more than 1,000 times less than a single dental x-ray."
Pavel Povinec of Comenius University in Slovakia and Katsumi Hirose of Sophia University in Japan studied seawater and biota samplings collected offshore from Fukushima and the Pacific northwest. They found that the total effective dose from an average annual consumption of contaminated fish, shellfish and seaweed caught in coastal waters off Fukushima was estimated to be anywhere between 0.2 to 1.0 millisieverts (mSv) a year.
Again, it's a tiny amount. According to the American Cancer Society, the average American is exposed to about three times that amount from natural sources over the course of a year. You would receive about 8 mSv from a single standard x-ray of your abdomen. The estimated individual doses of eating fish and seafood from the Fukushima region, the researchers concluded, "have been below the levels when any health damage of the Japanese and world population could be expected."
Still, scientists continue to measure the Fukushima signal. Last month, the icebreaker CCGS Sir Wilfrid Laurier collected samples of surface seawater as it traveled between Victoria, British Columbia, to Dutch Harbor, Alaska. The mission was the latest chapter of the ongoing research conducted as part of the Integrated Fukushima Ocean Radionuclide Monitoring (InFORM) Network, a collaborative radiation monitoring program to understand the environmental risks for Canada's Pacific and Arctic oceans from the Fukushima disaster. Results will be made available on the InFORM website in a few months.
"This information will help to determine how well model predictions of the activities and progression of ocean-borne contamination across the Pacific Ocean match with observations," said Jay T. Cullen, a marine chemist and oceanographer at the University of Victoria. "Understanding the spread of this contamination provides important information on the impact of the Fukushima Dai-ichi disaster on the health of the Pacific ecosystem and the North American public."
The researchers from the University of Rhode Island and Canada's Department of Fisheries and Oceans estimate that the future total level of cesium-137 will reach maximum values by 2015-'16 "before declining to levels closer to the fallout background" by 2012. They conclude: "The increase in cesium-137 levels in the eastern North Pacific from Fukushima inputs will probably return eastern North Pacific concentrations to the fallout levels that prevailed during the 1980s but does not represent a threat to human health or the environment."
Locations where surface seawater samples were collected for the InFORM project in July 2015. Photo credit: InFORM
But while scientists have failed to find reason for concern, there continues to be public worry about the radioactivity that leaked from the Fukushima plant and how it may impact the food system and human health. Donald W. Miller, Jr., professor emeritus of surgery at the University of Washington in Seattle, explains our seemingly irrepressible fear of radiation:
"Along with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), elected government officials, newspapers science writers, TV reporters and journalists and consequently, most Americans believe that low doses of radiation are harmful. People have "radiophobia"—the fear that any level of ionizing radiation, no matter how small, is dangerous. Why? For one thing, the news media fosters it because fear sells. Scary stories about the dangers of radiation keep people tuned in. Another reason, which lies deeper in the collective psyche, is that this phobia expresses the deep-seated sense of revulsion that Americans feels over the devastation and loss of life cause by the atomic bombs that its country dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II."
In addition, many people don't realize that radioactivity is not only all around us, but within us. As Stephen Frantz, former director of the Reed College Nuclear Reactor, points out:
"The human body contains radioactive elements. Naturally occurring potassium-40, carbon-14, uranium and thorium are present in every human body. Together they undergo about half a million decays every minute … Approximately half a million times every minute of your life a radioactive atom in your body decays and irradiates you from inside with radiation. This has happened every minute of your life."
Radioactivity in some natural and other materials, include:
Photo credit: World Nuclear Association
"Life on Earth has developed with an ever present background of radiation," notes Eric J. Hall, a professor of radiology at Columbia University, in his book Radiation and Life. "It is not something new, invented by the wit of man: radiation has always been there."
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A Game of Jenga
<p>Think of it as a game of Jenga and the planet's climate system as the tower. For generations, we have been slowly removing blocks. But at some point, we will remove a pivotal block, such as the collapse of one of the major global ocean circulation systems, for example the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), that will cause all or part of the global climate system to fall into a planetary emergency.</p><p>But worse still, it could cause runaway damage: Where the tipping points form a domino-like cascade, where breaching one triggers breaches of others, creating an unstoppable shift to a radically and swiftly changing climate.</p><p>One of the most concerning tipping points is mass methane release. Methane can be found in deep freeze storage within permafrost and at the bottom of the deepest oceans in the form of methane hydrates. But rising sea and air temperatures are beginning to thaw these stores of methane.</p><p>This would release a powerful greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, 30-times more potent than carbon dioxide as a global warming agent. This would drastically increase temperatures and rush us towards the breach of other tipping points.</p><p>This could include the acceleration of ice thaw on all three of the globe's large, land-based ice sheets – Greenland, West Antarctica and the Wilkes Basin in East Antarctica. The potential collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet is seen as a key tipping point, as its loss could eventually <a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/324/5929/901" target="_blank">raise global sea levels by 3.3 meters</a> with important regional variations.</p><p>More than that, we would be on the irreversible path to full land-ice melt, causing sea levels to rise by up to 30 meters, roughly at the rate of two meters per century, or maybe faster. Just look at the raised beaches around the world, at the last high stand of global sea level, at the end of the Pleistocene period around 120,0000 years ago, to see the evidence of such a warm world, which was just 2°C warmer than the present day.</p>Cutting Off Circulation
<p>As well as devastating low-lying and coastal areas around the world, melting polar ice could set off another tipping point: a disablement to the AMOC.</p><p>This circulation system drives a northward flow of warm, salty water on the upper layers of the ocean from the tropics to the northeast Atlantic region, and a southward flow of cold water deep in the ocean.</p><p>The ocean conveyor belt has a major effect on the climate, seasonal cycles and temperature in western and northern Europe. It means the region is warmer than other areas of similar latitude.</p><p>But melting ice from the Greenland ice sheet could threaten the AMOC system. It would dilute the salty sea water in the north Atlantic, making the water lighter and less able or unable to sink. This would slow the engine that drives this ocean circulation.</p><p><a href="https://www.carbonbrief.org/atlantic-conveyor-belt-has-slowed-15-per-cent-since-mid-twentieth-century" target="_blank">Recent research</a> suggests the AMOC has already weakened by around 15% since the middle of the 20th century. If this continues, it could have a major impact on the climate of the northern hemisphere, but particularly Europe. It may even lead to the <a href="https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/handle/10871/39731?show=full" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">cessation of arable farming</a> in the UK, for instance.</p><p>It may also reduce rainfall over the Amazon basin, impact the monsoon systems in Asia and, by bringing warm waters into the Southern Ocean, further destabilize ice in Antarctica and accelerate global sea level rise.</p>The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation has a major effect on the climate. Praetorius (2018)
Is it Time to Declare a Climate Emergency?
<p>At what stage, and at what rise in global temperatures, will these tipping points be reached? No one is entirely sure. It may take centuries, millennia or it could be imminent.</p><p>But as COVID-19 taught us, we need to prepare for the expected. We were aware of the risk of a pandemic. We also knew that we were not sufficiently prepared. But we didn't act in a meaningful manner. Thankfully, we have been able to fast-track the production of vaccines to combat COVID-19. But there is no vaccine for climate change once we have passed these tipping points.</p><p><a href="https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-global-risks-report-2021" target="_blank">We need to act now on our climate</a>. Act like these tipping points are imminent. And stop thinking of climate change as a slow-moving, long-term threat that enables us to kick the problem down the road and let future generations deal with it. We must take immediate action to reduce global warming and fulfill our commitments to the <a href="https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Paris Agreement</a>, and build resilience with these tipping points in mind.</p><p>We need to plan now to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, but we also need to plan for the impacts, such as the ability to feed everyone on the planet, develop plans to manage flood risk, as well as manage the social and geopolitical impacts of human migrations that will be a consequence of fight or flight decisions.</p><p>Breaching these tipping points would be cataclysmic and potentially far more devastating than COVID-19. Some may not enjoy hearing these messages, or consider them to be in the realm of science fiction. But if it injects a sense of urgency to make us respond to climate change like we have done to the pandemic, then we must talk more about what has happened before and will happen again.</p><p>Otherwise we will continue playing Jenga with our planet. And ultimately, there will only be one loser – us.</p>By John R. Platt
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