PropertyValue
?:author
?:datePublished
  • 2017-08-10 (xsd:date)
?:headline
  • Did Fukushima Officials Warn that Humans Should Never Eat Fish Again? (en)
?:inLanguage
?:itemReviewed
?:mentions
?:reviewBody
  • On 5 August 2017, the conspiracy-peddling website Your News Wire published a story β€” devoid of any citations or named sources β€” with the headline Fukushima Officials: Humans Should Never Eat Fish Again. Fukushima scientists, the writer claims, have concluded that the days of eating fish from the Pacific ocean are well and truly over thanks to widespread contamination from the 2011 tsunami and resulting nuclear disaster: If the phrase your days of eating fish from the Pacific Ocean are over sounds familiar, it’s because this quote has been used in a variety of fear-mongering posts related to Fukushima since 2013. The claim doesn't originate with a scientist, but with a man named Gary Stamper, who wrote an opinion piece for the Collapsing into Consciousness blog β€” a web site and forum devoted to issues surrounding the collapse of civilization. Many of the claims made in the Stamper piece stem from fears and media reports generated by a 5 August 2013 admission from TEPCO that waters leaking from Fukushima reactors into the Pacific were more radioactive than previously reported. However, most of the claims in this post are overblown or outright false, and assertions of a connection between animal die-offs and Fukushima radiation remain unsubstantiated. Your News Wire then continues into another unsourced section of vague, largely inaccurate, and wholly out-of-date information about radiation leaking from the reactor: This contamination was substantial, and its effects were later detected in western North America. However, claims that this contamination has been continuing at the same rate into the present are incorrect, according to director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Center for Marine and Environmental Radioactivity, who spoke to PBS Newshour in 2016 about this very topic: As we have written about in detail, it is technically accurate to say that radiation tied to Fukushima has been detected in at least one salmon found in 2015 in Washington state. This fish had an unambiguous chemical marker linking it to the Fukushima reactor. However the level of radiation detected was equal to or less than the amount of radiation found naturally in any fish in the Pacific Ocean, and was therefore not indicative of a direct health risk. We rate this claim as false because it misrepresents a questionable blog post as a scientific investigation in order to use a flashy quote, and further challenges credibility by mixing together a variety of out-of-date themes based on blog posts from four years before. (en)
?:reviewRating
rdf:type
?:url