Researchers found albacore tuna that had been caught off the Oregon shore following the Fukushima disaster had slight elevated levels of radioactivity.
One would have to eat 700,000 pounds of tuna to match the level of radioactivity the average human is exposed to in everyday life, an Oregon State University news release reported.
"You can't say there is absolutely zero risk because any radiation is assumed to carry at least some small risk," Delvan Neville, a graduate research assistant in the Department of Nuclear Engineering and Radiation Health Physics at Oregon State University and lead author on the study said in the news release. "But these trace levels are too small to be a realistic concern.
"A year of eating albacore with these cesium traces is about the same dose of radiation as you get from spending 23 seconds in a stuffy basement from radon gas, or sleeping next to your spouse for 40 nights from the natural potassium-40 in their body," he said. "It's just not much at all."
To make their findings the research team looked at 26 Pacific albacore that had been caught in the region between 2008 and 2012; both before and after the disaster occurred.
I the future exposure to the radiation plume could increase the levels in these fish, but the researchers are confident it would still not be high enough to make them dangerous for human consumption.
"The presence of these radioactive isotopes is actually helping us in an odd way - giving us information that will allow us to estimate how albacore tuna migrate between our West Coast and Japan," Neville said.
Little is known about the migration of the tuna until they reach the U.S. at around the age of three.
"That's kind of surprising, considering what a valuable food source they are," Phillips said. "Fukushima provides the only known source for a specific isotope that shows up in the albacore, so it gives us an unexpected fingerprint that allows us to learn more about the migration," Jason Phillips, a research associate in OSU's College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences and co-author on the study said in the news release.
