Scientists Confirm Small Amounts of Fukushima Radiation Have Reached West Coast

A plume of radiation from the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in Japan has voyaged through the Pacific Ocean and reached the west coast of North America, scientists confirmed in a new article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal.

The radiation, which is expected to peak at the end of 2015, will remain well below levels deemed safe for drinking and “does not represent a threat to human health or the environment,” say the researchers.

Lead author John N. Smith, research scientist at the Bedford Institute of Oceanography in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, and several colleagues conducted what they say is the “first systematic study to our knowledge of the transport of the Fukushima marine radioactivity signal to the eastern North Pacific.”

The researchers collected data between 2011 and 2013 from 26 sites, looking for radioactive substances Cesium-134 and Cesium-137 from the Fukushima meltdown, which was touched off by Japan’s March 2011 earthquake and tsunami and is believed to be the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl.