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Toxic Tuna

Fukushima's fish are at consumable levels but still contain various and complex ranges of radioactivity.

Walking about Tokyo in the wobbliness of constant aftershocks, I wouldn’t allow myself to eat a single piece of fish during a 30 hour layover last April. I had chicken katsu for every meal and a lot of Kirin milk tea (which I have since learned might be a great source of melamine). My elementary understanding of ticket vending machines in Shinjuku—however irrelevant—was signal enough that I didn’t want to be a bother, asking people undecipherable questions about the quality of hamachi).

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“Don’t go to Fukushima! It’s a nuclear bomb!” A friendly young man joked darkly while helping me buy a ticket to Shibuya.

But after all this time, how safe are seafood conditions? How bad could a little bite into some fatty toro be? And what if the fish came from Fukushima’s coast where serious radioactive spillage happened?

Over a year and a half later, Ken Buesseler, a marine chemist from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution is busy dealing with such questions off Fukushima’s coast. Having looked at the 9,000 samples published by Japan’s Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, Buesseler has concluded that fish are at consumable levels while still containing various and complex ranges of radioactivity.

Read the rest over at Motherboard.