Citizen scientists test Pacific for Fukushima radiation

On the last Sunday in November, Terry Waldron waded into the surf at Nye Beach in Newport and filled a plastic bucket from the frigid Pacific Ocean.

The salty water now sits in a laboratory across the country, at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, awaiting testing on highly sensitive equipment.

Waldron is part of a corps of West Coast citizen scientists sampling ocean water near their homes for traces of radiation from the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant on the other side of the Pacific.

New data from Woods Hole shows very low levels of Fukushima radiation about 400 miles due west of Newport, as well as at other offshore sites along the West Coast.

At current levels, the radiation is not expected to harm humans or the environment.

But in the absence of federal monitoring, citizens such as Waldron have taken it upon themselves test for its arrival on beaches.

"My husband surfs a lot. He lived in Newport for 12 years before we met," Waldron said. "He has cancer, and we eat a lot of fish. I have a lot of reasons to want to conduct a test like this."

Waldron's sampling site is the fourth in Oregon and joins more than three dozen from the Gulf of Alaska to San Diego.

Woods Hole chemical oceanographer Ken Buesseler runs the project, called Our Radioactive Ocean, from his lab in Massachusetts.

So far citizen science tests haven't found Fukushima radiation on shores, he said.

But Buesseler also joined forces with the captain of a marine research vessel to take offshore samples.

In October, he reported that a sample taken about 745 miles west of Vancouver, British Columbia, tested positive for Cesium 134, the so-called "fingerprint" of Fukushima because it could only have come from the plant.

It also showed higher-than-background levels of Cesium 137, another Fukushima isotope that already is present in the world's oceans from nuclear testing in the 1950s and 1960s.

Last month, as more of those samples were processed, Buesseler reported that Fukushima radiation had been identified in 10 offshore samples, including one 100 miles off the coast of Eureka, Calif.

Now, further results show four positive samples off Oregon's shores, with the closest off Newport.

The samples were taken Aug. 4 at depths between 49 and 490 feet.

Further samples from the research cruise await processing.

Buesseler now is teaming up with scientists at the University of Victoria in Canada on a similar project called InFORM, for Integrated Fukushima Ocean Radionuclide Monitoring.

It includes about a dozen sites along the British Columbia coast where volunteer citizens are regularly collecting water and seafood samples for analysis.

Loew also reports for the (Salem, Ore.) Statesman Journal

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