General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region Forums608 # tuna sells for $1.8 million
Extinction will carry a price tag, I said, years ago.
Link to tweet
ZZenith
(4,110 posts)Fortunately mayonnaise is cheaper.
LuvLoogie
(6,855 posts)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.
ZZenith
(4,110 posts)Japan is a fascinating place.
Beakybird
(3,329 posts)OnDoutside
(19,908 posts)no_hypocrisy
(45,786 posts)have radiation from Fukushima. Would it be worth more if it didn't register on a Geiger Counter?
Takket
(21,425 posts)LuvLoogie
(6,855 posts)Flaleftist
(3,473 posts)TexasBushwhacker
(20,044 posts)He owns a chain of sushi restaurants. He paid over $3 million last year.
caraher
(6,276 posts)The purchase isn't tuna, it's publicity
hunter
(38,264 posts)roamer65
(36,739 posts)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)Radioactivity might or might not kill you, but humans definitely will, especially if there's a $1.8 million bounty on your corpse.
roamer65
(36,739 posts)But it sounds a little fishy to me.
caraher
(6,276 posts)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 youll get sick, Buesseler said. Youd have to eat above that limit every day to have what a government considers a significant cancer risk.
This isnt 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 Japans radiation cap. The good news is that no Fukushima-caught fish have surpassed safety limits since 2015.
Some Japanese fishery test data
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:
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)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)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)Maybe there's one that got lost and it's swimming about in the Ohio River.........
KY........