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LuvLoogie

(6,855 posts)
5. maybe over $3000 per pound if you consider bone weight.
Sun Jan 5, 2020, 11:26 PM
Jan 2020

wholesale about $200 an ounce

By the time it gets to your plate, maybe $500 for a couple pieces of sushi. Maybe $750 to $1000 for the toro.

no_hypocrisy

(45,786 posts)
3. IMHO, almost equivalent to extinct considering the waters from which it was caught
Sun Jan 5, 2020, 11:23 PM
Jan 2020

have radiation from Fukushima. Would it be worth more if it didn't register on a Geiger Counter?

roamer65

(36,739 posts)
11. I wonder how much radioactive strontium and cesium is in it.
Mon Jan 6, 2020, 02:56 AM
Jan 2020

Read a report a year or two back that of 15 tuna from the Pacific, all had measurable quantities of radioactive strontium and cesium.

hunter

(38,264 posts)
13. If I was a fish I'd rather be slightly radioactive and free than on a dinner plate.
Mon Jan 6, 2020, 03:48 AM
Jan 2020


Radioactivity might or might not kill you, but humans definitely will, especially if there's a $1.8 million bounty on your corpse.


caraher

(6,276 posts)
15. Probably not much
Mon Jan 6, 2020, 04:23 AM
Jan 2020
Levels of Fukushima radionuclides are low in fish that have been measured.

The risks were greatly exaggerated, for example, when several bluefin tuna and one sockeye salmon showed up in the United States and Canada carrying traces of radioactive cesium from Fukushima. Super-sensitive instruments detected the cesium, but the fish weren’t unsafe to eat. “Just because you can detect it,” Fisher said, “doesn’t mean it’s dangerous.”

Even an iota of radiation sounds unsettling, but fish caught in the United States never came close to breaching government safety limits for food. Japan caps radioactive cesium at 100 becquerels per kilogram. The United States limits it to 1,200. Even at their most radioactive, bluefin tuna caught in California waters clocked in at just a sliver of these limits, at around 10 becquerels of radioactive cesium per kilogram of body weight. A year after the disaster, radioactive cesium levels in California tuna had slipped to an average of just 2.7 becquerels per kilo.

Eating a single dish above the U.S. or Japanese cap is no guarantee you’ll get sick, Buesseler said. “You’d have to eat above that limit every day to have what a government considers a significant cancer risk.”

This isn’t to say all fish everywhere had equally trace levels of radioactivity. Tuna caught in Japanese waters after the disaster had around 15 times more radioactive cesium, Fisher said — so, above Japanese government limits, but below U.S. ones. And certain types of seafood caught in and around Fukushima Harbor also exceeded Japan’s radiation cap. The good news is that no Fukushima-caught fish have surpassed safety limits since 2015.


Some Japanese fishery test data



Fig. 1

Concentration of cesium in fishery products after Fukushima disaster, published by Fishery Agency (http://www.jfa.maff.go.jp/e/inspection/, accessed 10 November 2016), showing that no seafood has exceeded the criterion since the second quarter of 2015


[link:https://www.pnas.org/content/110/26/10670|
Woods Hole's web site links to a study bluefin tuna specifically]. Among other things, they looked at a hypothetical Japanese consumer whose entire annual consumption of seafood (56 kg per person, reflecting the national average) came from bluefin tuna contaminated at the levels measured in April 2011. They found the additional radiation burden from radioactive Cs isotopes was just over 30 microSieverts, compared with 1340 microSieverts from naturally-occurring radionuclides (30 from K-40, and 1310 from Po-210).

A later study broadened the analysis. The abstract:

Variations of Fukushima-derived radionuclides (90Sr, 134Cs and 137Cs) in seawater and biota offshore Fukushima and in the NW Pacific Ocean were investigated and radiation doses to the Japanese and world population from ingestion of seafood contaminated by Fukushima radionuclides were estimated and compared with those from other sources of anthropogenic and natural radionuclides. The total effective dose commitment from ingestion of radionuclides in fish, shellfish and seaweed caught in coastal waters off Fukushima was estimated to be 0.6 ± 0.4 mSv/y. The individual effective dose commitment from consumption of radioactive-contaminated fish caught in the open Pacific Ocean was estimated to be 0.07 ± 0.05 mSv/y. These doses are comparable or much lower than doses delivered from the consumption of natural 210Po in fish and in shellfish (0.7 mSv/y). The estimated individual doses have been below the levels when any health damage of the Japanese and world population could be expected.


These values are larger than in the first study that focused just on bluefin tuna, probably because other types of seafood had higher levels of contamination than bluefin tuna.

KY_EnviroGuy

(14,483 posts)
16. It's all been washed toward the West coast of the U.S. and Canada, or.....
Mon Jan 6, 2020, 05:17 AM
Jan 2020

as an old industry expression from my former business goes: "dilution is the solution to pollution"........

There really has been a lot of debris from that tsunami washed up on West coast beaches.

I wonder how decontamination of the land around that plant is going and if any is being repopulated. I recall some villages had to be completely evacuated and have remained so for a long time.

Thanks for posting that data and the good links..........

caraher

(6,276 posts)
18. Yes, dilution is key
Mon Jan 6, 2020, 06:17 AM
Jan 2020

It's mostly just... everywhere... by now. Similar to what happened to all the fallout from atmospheric nuclear testing, though slower. And leaving aside what's in the soil and storage tanks near Fukushima (which I hear they're likely to dump into the ocean anyway)

KY_EnviroGuy

(14,483 posts)
17. Might be time to drag those fishing poles down out of the attic.
Mon Jan 6, 2020, 05:22 AM
Jan 2020

Maybe there's one that got lost and it's swimming about in the Ohio River.........

KY........

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