Like many Californians, John Bauer has been concerned about the lack of hard facts in the media about Fukushima radiation and the Pacific Ocean.
Bauer, trained by the United States Navy on use of Geiger counters, decided to find out for himself.
When the tsunami hit Japan back in 2011, it poured houses, boats, bodies and radiation into the ocean. The ocean currents travel slowly and steadily clockwise, meaning the waters that were off Japan when the big wave hit are now moving slowly down the Pacific Coast.
To worry or not to worry? That is the question.
The vast majority of the scientific community and government officials say miniscule increases in radiation in the now arriving water won”t cause any health or seafood contamination concerns.
Yet many blogs provide conspiratorial and apocalyptic views. And even mainstream scientists say the government is not doing a good enough job of monitoring the Pacific.
Locals buy Geiger counters
While serving in the Navy, Bauer was posted at the air station in Brunswick, Maine, where he was on the NBC decontamination team from 1981 to 1985. NBC stands for nuclear, biological and chemical.
“I became second in command of the decontamination team. We had to make sure that, if there was an accident, that the people coming out of the site were clean. The very Geiger counter that I bought off eBay was the same model and type and even year as the one that I was trained to use in the U.S. Navy,” said Bauer.
He has made regular visits to beaches on the Mendocino Coast, from Fort Bragg to Albion.
Bauer hasn”t found anything but typical background radiation with the Geiger counter but he plans to keep looking. He is baffled by reports like the viral video of a man at Surfer”s Beach in Pacifica whose Geiger counter seems to register very high levels of radiation.
“Mine has a self-calibration device so that I know the unit is working,” said Bauer.
After getting out of the Navy, Bauer got a science education degree from the University of Hawaii and was a science teacher.
“I think this would be a good story keeping watch over the invisible invaders from Japan,” said Bauer.
Local resident Sakina Bush also went out with a Geiger counter in Fort Bragg recently and found nothing but background radiation. Others who have radiation meters on their homes also report nothing worth mentioning.
But what about that guy in San Mateo County with the Geiger counter?
“Recent tests by the San Mateo County public health department and the California Department of Public Health show that elevated levels of radiation at Half Moon Bay are due to naturally occurring materials and not radioactivity associated with the Fukushima incident,” said Wendy Hopkins of CDPH.
While that guy may have stumbled onto something serious but unrelated, there is no evidence of any problems from the Fukushima plume, she said.
“The volume of water in the Pacific Ocean has a significant diluting effect on radionuclides that are present and it is not anticipated that the concentration will increase in the waters off of the West Coast,” said Hopkins.
“CDPH has collected and will be analyzing sand samples from Half Moon Bay. Results of the analysis will be posted on the CDPH Radiologic Health (RHB) website (http:// www.cdph.ca.gov/programs/Pages/RHB-RadReport.aspx) as soon as the analysis is completed,” she said.
As of Jan. 19, the most recent radiation update on the site was from 2012.
What about seafood?
Some fisheries in Japan are still closed because of radioactive contamination. Bottom fish are especially prone to contamination because the fallout collects on the seafloor where they live. While no dangerous levels have ever been demonstrated outside of Japanese waters, there have been spikes in tuna, which are at the top of the food chain.
This reporter and other locals looking for actual facts about radiation and the currents from the online media have been disappointed.
Bob Spies consults for the Ocean Conservancy locally. He turned to scientific journals to get the story.
“One journal article used modeling to project an increase of 1 cpm of radiation per cubic meter of sea water once all the radionuclides have been diluted across the North Pacific Ocean. That may be a measurable increase but is certainly not something that I would worry about. That is not enough to be detected with a hand-held Geiger counter,” Spies said.
Like a police department that stops investigating a murder at the town limits, the U.S. has had no program for testing the current while it was slowly moving across the Pacific for the past three years.
Criticism of this has included not just alarmists but also Dr. Ken Buesseler of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, who has been a leader since 2011 in both researching radiation and the sea and explaining how the threat has been exaggerated. He cautions that no organized testing of Pacific Ocean water or marine life on the Pacific Coast has been happening, and it should be.
This is all part of a broader problem in that there is no organized regulation or monitoring of the ocean. This despite the fact the open ocean is more important to subjects like global warming than all the nations of the world combined.
All the scientific tests show slightly elevated radiation levels, which experts say are no cause for worry. Not enough monitoring is going on, so it pays to spend the time searching for scanty facts.
