No, Fukushima is not killing off massive quantities of sea life near California
Deep Sea News, a blog written largely by professional ocean scientists, has been doing a really good job of debunking bogus stories about Fukushima radiation affecting ocean wildlife near North America. And there are a lot to choose from. It's damn near a genre, at this point — a genre that's full of misleading information and flat-out fabrications. For instance, the latest story to circulate on social media is all about how Fukushima radiation is causing massive die-offs of sea life off the coast of California.
But this claim falls apart pretty quickly. At Deep Sea News, Craig McClain, Assistant Director of Science for the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center, found that, perhaps unsurprisingly, the real science behind this story has nothing to do with radiation or Fukushima. Instead, writers at Natural News apparently took a scientific journal article about climate and food cycles in the deep ocean and just decided, without any basis, that the bloom/die-off cycles recorded in the paper must have been caused by Fukushima. This, despite the fact that those cycles have been happening since before 2011.
McClain breaks down the research paper that Natural News used to make their Fukushima claims and explains what's really going on. One key point, the paper isn't even about mysterious deaths of massive amounts of marine creatures. It's about bloom/die-off cycles, a natural process in which small creatures like algae and jelly-like salps explode in number and then die, sinking to the seafloor where their bodies feed other animals. When the paper says that the die-offs are larger than they used to be, what it's really saying is that populations of algae and salps are getting larger and that sudden blooms in those populations are getting bigger. The real science is not a story about death, at all. It's a story about a food cycle on steroids.
-snip-
I'm really not kidding. Natural News literally pulled the Fukushima reference out of thin air, based solely on the fact that three large algae blooms occurred after the spring of 2011 — even though those were part of a pattern of especially large blooms dating back to 2006, and the overall quantity of small plants and animals involved in the bloom/die-off cycle has been especially high since 2003. And then Natural News insinuated that scientists and other news outlets were engaging in conspiracy or willful ignorance because those people didn't make wild, speculative claims with no basis in fact. Essentially, Natural News lies to you. And, for that, they're being rewarded with increased readership. So here's a better plan. In the future, when you see a headline on Facebook or Twitter telling you about Fukushima harming North American fisheries or ocean life, don't bother clicking on that link. Go check out Deep Sea News, instead, and get the real story behind the headline.
http://boingboing.net/2014/01/06/no-fukushima-is-not-killing-o.html?utm_content=buffer1817c&utm_source=buffer&utm_medium=facebook&utm_campaign=Buffer
http://deepseanews.com/
= new reply since forum marked as read
Another one for the Laugher Hall of Fame. 
Making conclusive statements like the OP has is, well, kinda dumb, eh?
Nope. But disagreeing with it is.
1 - Uranium, isotopes 238 and 235 = 22 million-trillion Bq
2 – Potassium-40 = 7.4 billion-trillion Bq
3 – Tritium (Hydrogen-3) = 370 thousand-trillion Bq
4 – Carbon-14 = 3 million-trillion Bq
5 – Rubidium-87 = 700 million-trillion Bq.
While 30 thousand-trillion (Fukushima’s number) is astonishing in-itself, when we compare it to the roughly billions-of-trillion number that occurs naturally, it takes the scare-factor out of the rhetorical equation. Opponents to nuclear energy like to use the Fukushima numbers in isolation from what we find in nature because it scares people and fulfills their antinuclear agenda. When placed in context, the scare-factor diminishes mightily
http://www.hiroshimasyndrome.com/fukushima-commentary.html
That one was one cool CT!
Shocked. Shocked I am.
Sid
