Japan’s Prime Minister ate fish caught off Fukushima’s coast on Wednesday to alleviate fears after the controversial release of water from the disabled Ōkuma nuclear power station.
Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and three Cabinet ministers enjoyed sashimi fished off the coast of Fukushima at a lunch meeting on Wednesday, in an apparent effort to dispel safety concerns following the release of treated radioactive wastewater from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant.
According to Economy and Industry Minister Yasutoshi Nishimura, who was at the lunch meeting, Kishida and the three lawmakers sat down to a spread of flounder, octopus and seabass as well as boiled pork, fruits and various vegetables in the leader’s office.
“We eat in support of the Sanriku Joban region. All seafood items from Sanriku Joban are full of appeal,” Kishida told reporters who were invited to film the meal.
This is such a non-issue it’s ridiculous. There is honestly more of a danger from heavy metals in the fish they ate than from radiation. Tritium is a very, very low level beta-emitter, and at the concentrations they’re releasing (less than 1500 Bq/L, ~4E-8 Ci/L), drinking nothing but water contaminated at that level for an entire year would yield a dose rate of less than 4 mrem/year (based on the NRC math that 60,900 pCi/L for a year yields a dose of 4mrem). For context, 4 mrem (40 μSv) is the amount of exposure you receive in a flight from NYC to LA.. That is damn near a rounding error on the average yearly exposure to members of the public.
But people gotta be scared because Joe Public doesn’t really understand radiation, and fear sells.
As someone who loves sashimi, I’m secretly hoping that demand will drop sufficiently so that prices will be lowered.
For me the fish would have to be flown in from Japan. Which would expose the fish to more radiation than the water. Hmmmm
I wonder how many more public people would scream to stop eating fish if you told them that fish has mercury in it
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