Radioactive Water Dumped Into Pacific Ocean Off Japan: Still Safe to Eat Sushi?

If you’re the kind of person who loves sushi, there’s not a whole lot that will deter you from eating your beloved raw slices of fish. Though your friends might cringe at the sight of you gobbling down cold, uncooked hunks of tuna, The New York Times may have the news that will get you to ponder your next Philly Roll.

In the latest desperate attempt to stave off a full-on nuclear core meltdown, the Tokyo Electric Power Company started dumping more than 11,000 tons of radioactive water from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant into the Pacific Ocean on Monday.

And they’re not done. The dump was merely to make room in storage containers for yet more contaminated runoff that will be released over the next few days. The dirty water has nearly 100 times the legal limit of radiation, with some tainted with 10,000 times the legal limit.

The effort may help the workers attempting to clear radioactive water from the turbine buildings reach the cooling controls that were damaged by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami. But the radioactive flow could keep coming, especially since workers have not been able to plug a gushing leak from a crack in a containment pit near the No. 2 reactor.

Yukio Edano, the chief cabinet secretary, has ordered the power company to monitor the effects of radioactive dumps on Pacific sea life. The Times reported that consuming seafood caught in the area every day for a year would result in the intake of about 0.6 millisieverts of radiation, or a quarter of the average annual exposure to radiation in Japan.

But considering it could be months before the radioactive flow is stemmed, marine biologists fear fish could bear the brunt of contamination. Some of the elements in the dumped water, like cesium 137, with a half-life of 30 years, are collected in larger fish as they eat smaller fish, which could magnify the problem over time. The good news is that mixing radioactive water with uncontaminated seawater can quickly decrease radiation levels, but in the meantime, radiation levels 19 miles offshore are hundreds to thousands of times as high as levels sampled in the same area in 2005.

Seafood sales have already taken a hit, as the price of fish such as young yellowtail have fallen by half in recent days, even though one large fishery owner said his fishermen have found on traces of radioactivity so far. But, he worried, when tides shift from north to south in the fall that could all change.

Will you still eat sushi?