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On 10 February 2017, OrganicAndHealthy.org published a story with the frightening headline Fukushima: First Images Emerge Of Radioactive Salmon In Canada. While this post did, in fact, come with a stock image of Canadian salmon, it did not deliver on its promise of visual evidence of radioactive salmon, instead providing lazily researched, error-riddled assertions based entirely on others’ flawed reporting. Cesium-134 is a radioactive isotope formed principally by man-made activity, whose only plausible source on Earth, currently, is the Fukushima disaster. It decays at a relatively fast rate and therefore cannot be tied previous nuclear disasters or atomic testing. The narrative presented by OrganicAndHealthy.org conflates two issues: the presence of cesium-134 in marine waters off of the coast of western North America, and the presence of cesium-134 in North American salmon. Becquerels per cubic meter, cited above, are used to assess the concentration of radioactive isotopes in a volume of liquid, while becquerels per kilogram would be the appropriate for measuring its presence in fish. These issues are likely conflated because news of both radioactive salmon and radioactive marine waters in North America were reported together by a number of media outlets in December 2016. Here's an example from USA Today: Both statements are factual. Cesium’s presence on the Oregon Coast in November 2016 was a first, although an anticipated one. The presence of cesium-134 in salmon, as well, was a first. That announcement came from a University of Victoria initiative called InFORM, who issued a press release about the find on 15 November 2016: Of note are both the low levels detected and the fact that the report concerns, again, one single fish collected in 2015 (making any image of multiple salmon, employed by viral posts purporting to cover this news, wholly irrelevant to the story). To put 0.07 Bq kg-1 into proper context, the World Health Organization's limit for acceptable radiation adopted by most governments from radioisotopes in food is 1000.00 Bg kg-1. Further context can be provided by comparing the radioactivity of Fukushima-contaminated fish to the naturally occurring radioactivity of fish. A study published in March 2015 did just that. Reporting their values (in millisieverts per year) based on an assumed annual diet, these researchers found that the radioisotope exposure attributable to Fukushima in both Japanese fish and Pacific Northwest fish was equal to or less than the amount expected by radioisotopes that occur naturally in fish: Polonium-210 (210Po) is a highly radioactive decay product of lead-210, regularly formed in the atmosphere through the modification of radon gas, which Earth naturally and continually emits. The radioactive lead-210 rains down over earth, with a fraction decaying into polonium-210 in living organisms, as described in a 1965 paper in Nature: In other words, the cesium-134 in this single salmon almost certainly came from the Fukushima disaster, but eating it would be no more or less dangerous than consuming any fish on Earth. Not to be derailed by these observations, OrganicAndHealthy.org merely dismissed them by (in a sense) dismissing objective reality itself: This statement ignores the fact that, like it or not, humans are exposed to radiation naturally every moment of every day. According to a review of marine effects of the Fukushima disaster published on 30 June 2016: To be sure, the Fukushima disaster was a worldwide environmental catastrophe with global effects. The presence of a single North American salmon with trace levels of cesium-134, undoubtedly the result of the Fukushima event, will nevertheless have a barely negligible — let alone catastrophic — effect on public health.
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