Fukushima Radiation on US West Coast Poses No Health Risk, Scientists Say

Despite the devastating nuclear accident at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power plant in March 2011, scientists studying the waters off the west coast of the United States have concluded that there is no contamination risk to people or the local ecology.

Studying the waters of the Pacific coastline, scientists from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts and from Ottawa's Fisheries and Oceans Canada found levels of Cesium-134, the radiation footprint of the Fukushima disaster, to be at levels below what a dental patient would be exposed to in a routine X-ray, according to the Associated Press.

Radiation levels in surrounding seawater were found to be "even less than things like CT scans or flying in a plane or even living at high altitude. Personally I'm not concerned about those levels," said scientist Ken Buesseler of Woods Hole.

In a 2015 statement regarding the impact of seaborne Fukushima radiation on the coastline of the United States, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission asserted that levels of Cesium-134 "fall well short of posing any US health or environmental risk."

Alaskan fisheries officials in a January report stated that they found no detectable levels of Cesium-134 from the Fukushima disaster in any seafood pulled from the state's waters.