http://www.straight.com/life/497646/fish-data-belie-japans-claims-fukushima
Fish data belie Japan's claims on Fukushima

Are fish from the Pacific Ocean safe to eat? It’s a question that’s back in the news after revelations of highly radioactive water leaking into the ocean from Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.
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“Let me assure you, the situation is under control,” Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe said during lobbying for the 2020 Olympics. “There are no health-related problems until now, nor will there be in the future.”

But the fish tell a different story about the impacts of the March 2011 tsunami that destroyed the Fukushima plant and caused massive amounts of radiation to end up in the Pacific.

About 800 people worldwide will get cancer from radiation due to Fukushima in fish eaten to date, according to Georgia Straight calculations. The Straight results relied on a widely used cancer-risk formula developed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as well as radiation levels in 33,000 fish tested by the Japanese Fisheries Agency.

Half the cancers will be fatal. About 500 will be in Japan; 75 will be due to Japanese fish exports to other countries; and 225 will be from fishing in the Pacific by nations other than Japan.

And that’s likely only a small part of the actual long-term cancer impacts from eating the fish. Two nuclear experts who saw the Straight’s figures said the real cancer toll could be 100 times higher—or 80,000 cancers.

“The potential numbers could be two orders of magnitude [100 times] higher than your numbers,” Daniel Hirsch, a nuclear-policy lecturer at the University of California at Santa Cruz, said in a phone interview. “Hundreds of cancers are nothing to sneeze at, and it is a fraction of what I suspect the total will be.”

That could be the toll, Hirsch said, if all factors are taken into account, including: future fish consumption (the Straight’s number only includes fish eaten up to mid-July 2013); highly damaging isotopes that were released in the disaster but aren’t being monitored, such as strontium 90 and plutonium 239; consumption of contaminated fish caught in the entire Pacific (our number includes only fish caught in Japan and regions to the north and west of the archipelago, where the most radiation data exists, and doesn’t include any farmed fish); and research suggesting that radiation causes many more cancers than official formulas predict. (For more, see page 18.)

“Apologists say it’s a large ocean and dilution is the solution to pollution,” said Hirsch, who cochaired a California state appointed panel that oversaw a study of cancer among nuclear-power workers in the 1990s. “Dilution actually does nothing except expose a larger population.”