Hydros Fear

Over the weekend I had mentioned my friend Dr. Jonathan Burgess and I decided that we wanted to take a trip to Seaside, Oregon and also to a small town called Gearhart. There were a number of reasons for the trip; mostly for journalistic reasons as a recent article about “The Big One” meaning an earthquake is predicted to happen in that area, was recently published in the New Yorker magazine. The article expressed concerns for tsunamis in the area.

The biggest concern at this time however are the wildfires burning in that area. In fact, we were turned away from getting close to the small town and were detoured north through Vernonia, Banks and Astoria.

Astoria is the area where the movies the “Goonies” and “Short Circuit” were filmed.

Both Dr. Burgess and I were asking various residents if they were concerned about the New Yorker article that speaks of a Tsunami ordeal after a big earthquake.

One gas station attendant said that he was more concerned about radioactivity in the water on the Pacific coast.

We decided to avoid the Oregon coast and traveled over the very high altitude Astoria Bridge to a place called Long Beach. After we crossed the bridge we laughed at the irony that we saw two signs – one pointed right to a place called “Dismal Nitch” and the one that pointed left directed us to “Cape Disappointment.”

The humor was that we were off to take water and sand samples and then test them with a Geiger counter.

When we arrived at the coast we noticed that we had escaped the smoke filled skies of Oregon and were looking at the Pacific Ocean. There were huge swells and the ocean looked rough. It also looked more dirty than usual as the sea foam that is usually white was a yellowish green color.

We noticed a lot of dead jellyfish on the shore and a dead crab. One jellyfish looked as though it was attempting to digest some shrimp before it perished. It looked like a big blob of Aspic –an old jelly that was used in the 1950’s to mold meat, and pork into a gelatin shape for decorative purpose, like head cheese as an example.

It was quite a gross encounter.

We counted at least three dead jellyfish and one dead crab.

We had a Geiger counter but it was difficult to get clear samples because we were losing power in the battery. We wanted to see for ourselves the possible radio activity that is alleged to be in the Northwest Pacific and the Southern Pacific Oceans, respectively.

Over four years after the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan, the aftermath continues to haunt us. In the past few weeks we have been learning that ground water has been seeping into three of the six reactors, units 1, 2 and 3 and it is coming into contact with the melted cores and becoming contaminated.

Three to four hundred metric tons of this water has been flowing daily into the Pacific Ocean. The radioactive plume is carried east by the ocean currents.

There is now a warning that Radionuclides will move up the food chain to bioaccumulate and biomagnify.

The media has failed to report that important fisheries off Fukushima remain closed due to cesium levels above Japanese limits for seafood. Scientists and the Federal Drug Administration have predicted, according to their models, that the ocean radiation is eventually diluted and seafood on our coast safe to eat.

However, more and more consumers are becoming fickle over whether or not the contamination is affecting sea life and that several news stories that pop up in the back pages of the daily paper are indicating that the United States and Japan have failed to use scientific monitoring in order to report the public the surety that what is in the Pacific is not contaminated.

There seems to be no way to be sure that we are safe.

University of Nebraska-Lincoln researchers Karrie Weber and Jason Nolan have tested 275,000 water samples collected from 62,000 locations across the U.S. Their findings may not surprise some people and for others that truth is shocking.

The researchers found that parts of the High Plains Aquifer, also known as the Ogallala, are saturated with uranium at a level exceeding the EPA’s ‘safe limit’ 89 fold. California’s Central Valley was even worse, with a uranium concentration that is 180 times higher than the EPA’s maximum allowable contamination level.

This means that various areas all over the United States maybe seeing increases of radioactivity in the drinking water due to an accident that happened four years ago.

Researchers are also discovering that industrial agricultural practices are making the uranium more soluble, so it contaminates up our drinking water even more than normal.

Scientists have been receiving reports of dead and dying whales, birds and the small fish known as sand lance in the Aleutian Islands. All over Alaska there have been repots of thousands of dead herring washing up on shore.

Officials have said that the die off could be caused by an algae bloom while others are saying that the waters are showing signs of contamination do to the radioactive water plume that continues to expand into the Pacific Ocean.

Hundreds of dead herring washed up on Front Beach in downtown Unalaska—herring are used as bait by crab fishermen.

One other theory is that the herring were caught elsewhere and then when the fisherman found that they were contaminated just shoveled them off the boat.

Muscles and jellyfish were also washed up dead showing signs of toxicity, However the FDA had already mentioned that what we are seeing is a toxic algae bloom and not signs of radioactive contamination.

However according to Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s Center for Marine and Environmental Radiation, samples have been taken near Del Mar, California and shows significant radioactive contamination.

The sample was taken just over a mile off the coast of Del Mar, CA – located about 15 miles north of San Diego and 100 miles south of Los Angeles. The only other location Woods Hole has reported detecting nuclear waste from Fukushima Daiichi along the shoreline of North America is in Ucluelet, Canada about 1,200 miles to the north of Del Mar.

7.2 becquerels per cubic meter of Cesium-134 and Cesium-137 was measured in a Ucluelet sample taken last February. The Del Mar sample had 8.4 Bq/m3.

According to other media reports, “The plume coming from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant also contains other radioactive material, including Strontium 90… radioactive isotopes of iodine, low levels of plutonium and tritium might be in the plume as well.

According to Woods Hole scientist Ken Buesseler, “As the plume begins to arrive along the West Coast [it] will actually increase in concentration… no public agency in the US is monitoring the activities in the Pacific… Without careful, extensive, consistent monitoring, we’ll have no way of knowing how much radiation from Fukushima is reaching our shores, and how it could affect life in the ocean.”

While there are many authorities that say the plume can dilute as it moves through the ocean and that there is no real danger, the problem that is being overlooked is the possibility that the fish can eat drifting radioactive kelp.

According to an NBC news and an ENE news report:

CSULB Professor Dr. Steven Manley said he does not believe the contamination levels expected in the kelp will be high enough to be harmful to humans, but he couldn’t say the same for the ecosystem the kelp supports—radioactive kelp could drift anywhere and be consumed by fish and other water species.

A sea lion recently washed up on the shores of Alaska. The carcass of the dead sea creature did not display wounds.

Back in June, a huge purplish read blob arrived lining the shores from San Diego to San Francisco—the blob consisted of sea slugs and red tuna crabs. Some described the phenomenon as looking like a red carpet a good foot-to-16 inches thick.

Trillions of sea life is sending us all red flag warnings. The proof is in what is washing up on our shores. The proof is in how most blue fin tuna in the Pacific has been destroyed due to contamination. More proof is that Pacific halibut has been a food that has been avoided and that in the Pacific Northwest—Atlantic tuna is being used.

We all know that the fish and the sea lions don’t speak to us, but the deaths do. They are dying from human-generated poison in the Pacific.

Last June, Tepco announced they measured 1,000,000 Bq/m3 of Strontium-90 at two locations in Fukushima plant port. This is the highest reading in recorded history. The sample is the port seawater. Sampling date was May 4th 2015.

The location was near the water intake of Reactor 3 and 4, and also the screen of Reactor 4. The previous highest readings were lower than 700,000 Bq/m3.

Tepco has not made any announcement on this rapid increase. The mainstream media has not announced the increase nor have they indicated that there is any potential danger.

It is also interesting to note that a new study shows that radioactive cesium contamination levels in a river near the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant rise in the Spring and fall in the Autumn.

The researchers believe the rise is attributable to very large numbers of leaves containing radioactive substances falling into rivers in the Spring. In one year, the radioactive cesium level in the river in springtime was up to five times that in Autumn.

The rise is from radioactive leaves that are falling from radioactive trees. The whole idea sounds like it is out of a science fiction horror story.

Adding more to the nightmare is further notes in the study that According to researchers, carcasses of animals containing concentrated radioactive materials fall into the river in spring, increasing the amount of radioactive cesium in the river. Then the rainy season from June to mid-July, along with the typhoons that tend to strike during Summer and early Autumn, causes the amount of water in the river to surge, sweeping sediment to the river’s lower reaches and decreasing cesium levels in the Fall.

It is evident that nuclear accidents do not recognize, time, seasons, climate, countries or borders nor do they remain in the area where authorities claim they are contained. They all pose a health risk in the environment and even though we are not seeing a stark or an abrupt change in our lives, we could be seeing a deterioration of our health and well being.

We are told that what awaits is a brave new world… well it better be.

Text – Check out Ground Zero Radio with Clyde Lewis Live Nightly @ http://www.groundzeromedia.org