Three years on, the general public is still nervous about the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant disaster of March 2011. Heavy rain has caused more contaminated water leaks over the protection dike recently. The Japanese are increasingly distrustful of atomic scientists' claims that the contaminated water has failed to make it to the ocean. Meanwhile, The Cape Cod Times US newspapers reports that the Fukushima toxic waste is reaching the US West Coast, while 70 crewmembers of the US Ronald Reagan aircraft-carrier, involved in the relief operation in the wake of the disaster, are filing a lawsuit against the TEPCO Fukushima operator company, claiming the Japanese company had failed to warn them of all the risks that they were running during the operation.
USS Ronald Reaganwas riding athwart in the radioactive discharge plume 10 miles away from the crippled Fukushima plant. The crew desalinated seawater to use it in cooking, with some crewmembers developing cancerous diseases and/or becoming blind as a result.
The contamination of the ocean within the 10-mile zone of the nuclear power plant is due to the fact that some of the reactor nuclear decay products made it to the ocean, rather than to the air, as was the case in Chernobyl in 1986. Currents take harmful agents to great distances, so the seafood and fish that are caught in the contaminated currents even in other parts of the world may still prove a health hazard, says the Deputy Chairman of the State Duma Committee on Natural Resources,Maxim Shingarkin.
"Because of the World Ocean currents, the seafood that's caught off the US Pacific coast is more likely to contain radionuclides than the seafood in the Sea of Okhotsk, which is by far closer to Japan. It is these marine products that may find their way to the tables of different countries' residents that pose the gravest danger," he said.
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