Fukushima Radiation Exhibits ‘Sharp Spike,’ Worse Than Thought, Fukushima radiation has been in the news this week, with concern and panic following some unpleasant revelations about the situation on the ground at the plant. The issue of Fukushima radiation has been ongoing since a massive tsunami hit Japan in March of 2011, killing more than 15,000 people and crippling the nuclear plant in the long term.
A “radioactive plume” of water loosed in the Pacific from the Fukushima radiation leak should make its way to US shores next year, but according to the company in charge of securing the leakage, only a “drop” of contaminated water escaped. CNN reports that the Tokyo Electric Power Company said in a Sunday statement that it “will find out the cause of this issue and make proper counter measures immediately, and continue to make every effort to secure safety of workers.” According to NBC, the radioactive plume’s impact will “peak in 2016” in US waters, but the location of the Fukushima plant limited the impact of the leak.
Vincent Rossi, oceanographer and postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Cross-Disciplinary Physics and Complex Systems in Spain told the outlet that the “environmental impact could have been worse if the contaminated water would have been released in another oceanic environment in which the circulation was less energetic and turbulent” than the area in which the plume began.
NBC says researchers have been extrapolating the potential impact of Fukushima radiation on waters worldwide, using a tracer with a long half-life to measure impact over time. Rossi said: “One advantage of this tracer is its long half-life and our ability to measure it quite accurately, so that it can be used in the future to test our models of ocean circulation and see how well they represent reality over time… In 20 years’ time, we could go out, grab measurements everywhere in the Pacific and compare them to our model.”
