Craig Douglas: Former Fukushima Radiation Believer Pays for Lab Tests & Discovers Sea Kelp Purchased in Northern Japan Is Competely Safe

Thanks so much for conducting this mini study, and the reader should take note that it was performed at Michael’s own out of pocket expense.

Now you will find you have an uphill battle to get people to believe you, just as I have been doing for almost three years now. The scare mongers doom-and-gloom message has taken a firm foothold of this situation and there is no convincing them otherwise and will just dismiss you as a for-hire government lackey, or a nuclear industry shill. Even if there was more government sponsored testing or media coverage about this as you suggest, the conspiracy theorists will cry foul even more as being evidence of a cover-up. I cover a lot of conspiracies on my TV/radio show, but this just isn’t one of them. Maybe there is no coverage because it is a non-issue? I am speaking here for those in the USA and the rest of the world, not in Japan near the plant of course, and I certainly think nuclear power plants should be phased out since man has proven we really can’t control this method of power production without man-made accidents or what nature can throw at us. [snip]

Craig http://forbiddenknowledge.info/radiation.html

[snip] Here’s someone else who is trying to promote the truth, you are going to have to learn where we are to attempt to support your position since there are a thousand doom postings for every one calming posting: http://educate-yourself.org/cn/craigdouglasfukushimapropagandabattle05jan14.shtml

(Much of this blogpost was written before I had lab results, describing the samples and research objectives at length.  Additional data on natural isotopes, which I’m still waiting on, will be added (hopefully! if they become available…) in a future blogpost.)

Introduction

In a nutshell:  My suspicion and serious concern about the main cause of elevated radiation levels in some Japanese food (mainly Hokkaido kelps), found with a Geiger Counter when visiting Japan in autumn 2013, turns out to have been mostly unfounded and extremely overblown.  My findings, shared in this blogpost, in no way imply that all food in Japan or elsewhere is safe, but they do seriously undermine the credibility of all food reports that are based solely on Geiger Counter measurements.  There is almost nothing of artificial origin in the slightly radioactive foods I had analyzed, leaving (by very logical process of elimination), the cause of the elevated radioactivity to be entirely or almost entirely of natural origins.  More about that below.  

Research context:  Like many others, I’m concerned that the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear disaster is affecting not only sea life in and near Japan, but also thousands of miles from Japan, and that food in the US may end up containing increasing amounts of man-made radioactive materials.  The cause for this concern, apart from the ongoing disaster in Fukushima on the shore of the Western Pacific, is the impression that government agencies on the Eastern side of the Northern Pacific Ocean (US, Canada, Mexico) are strangely unresponsive to this widespread concern.  

This is not the first time I grew tired of lack of monitoring.  Last spring (2013) when I lived near Arcata, in Northern coastal California, I sent 4 samples to a lab (1 mushrooms, 2 soils, 1 seaweeds – See the results here (June 5, 2013)).  The lab results did not particularly raise my concerns (in fact they were somewhat of a relief, too); they just confirmed the need for more testing, especially as to identify where the (very likely) relative hotspots are in North America.  My seaweed sample then, unlike mushrooms and soils, contained only naturally occurring isotopes, not even a trace of Cesium-137 or Iodine-131.  

Since then, elevated levels of radiation have been observed in California (in rain (See EnviroReporter Nov 27, 2013), and on beach near San Francisco (See ENEnews Jan 4., 2014), yet (this is true regardless of what the caus(s) of these events end up being revealed to be) officials keep making statements about there being ‘no health hazard’, all being ‘below levels of concern’, etc, usually – and this is the problem: – BEFORE having up-to-date location-specific sample radioisotope-analysis data.  Geiger Counters only show elevated levels, they don’t tell you the precise causes; that takes laboratory tests of samples.   

I have a small data puzzle piece that may shed a little bit of extra light on the radioactive contamination situation of the Pacific Ocean.   My data is not simulated, anecdotal or speculative, but comes from precise scientific lab tests.  The data on man-made radioactivity in my sampled food items is in.

I was very concerned that I would be writing something very different, along the lines of, “My inquiry has revealed that the nuclear industry, near-certainly as a direct result of TEPCO’s [Stock market ticker: 9501:JP] still-leaking Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear disaster, has ruined at least part of the previously famously pristine coastal kelp forests of Hokkaido in far-Northern Japan,” (in fact, that is one of the lines of what I had ready in draft before I received the data…), but wow-was-I-wrong my lab results in fact revealed that the elevated radioactivity found in those kelps is in most cases entirely the result of naturally occurring radioisotopes, such as Potassium-40.Although I began considering this possibility recently (see my Jan. 9, 2014 blogpost, “Could (natural, normal) radioactive Potassium-40 (K-40) be the main cause of elevated radiation levels in food?“), this is NOT what I expected to find:

2/3rds of my suspected-to-be-significantly-contaminated samples contained no nuclear pollution at all.  None.   (Scientifically: the detected levels, if there were any, were below quantifyable levels).  The levels of artificial radionuclides in the other 1/3rd are extremely low, amounting to no more than unquantifiable ‘trace levels detected’.  Although this is a very small quantity of samples, nevertheless, based on these lab results, which powerfully undermined the grounds for my own concerns for current long-distance nuclear contamination (voiced HERE, here, here, here, here, here and in the previous blogpost), my own newly-adjusted personal conclusion (mid-January 2014, subject to change based on other new information) is now that at least HOKKAIDO SEAWEEDS are essentially SAFE TO EAT.

• 6 kelp seaweeds (from various parts of ‘Hokkaido’, in Northern Japan)
• 1 nori seaweed (Processed in Fukuoka,  Southern Japan)
• 1 dried Urume-Iwashi (round herring) fish snack (caught in Bungo Channel area, Japan)
• 1 Tea sample (Green Tea, growing region unknown but from Japan)

• All 9 samples received Gammaspectroscopy Analysis.  
• Of those 9 samples, unrelated to the gammaspectrospopy results, purely for additional scientific data:  3 kelp seaweed samples were also submitted for Plutonium analysis, Strontium-90 analysis, and Gross Alpha and Gross Beta analysis.  
• Lab note:  “Insufficient sample volumes were submitted for Samples 2, 3, 4, 8, and 9.  The results for these samples should be considered qualitative and not quantitative.”

Figure: Overview of selected sample lab analysis results.
© Michaël Van Broekhoven, 2014