Bad news from the annual American Geophysical Union’s Ocean Sciences Meeting in Honolulu. Researchers there announced today that radioactive isotopes from the Fukushima nuclear disaster, when three reactors melted down after the March 11, 2011, Tohoku earthquake and subsequent mega-tsunami, have finally reached the West Coast. John Smith, a research scientist at Canada’s Bedford Institute
The Topic: Radiation Exposure.
The Question: How do scientists know what kind of (and how much) radiation exposure we do or do not face?
From 1946 to 1958, the Bikini Atoll–a Micronesian, volcanic island group in the Pacific Ocean (part of the Marshall Islands)–was “home” to twenty three, U.S.-conducted, nuclear detonations, including the first true Hydrogen bomb test, in 1954. This latter detonation produced an explosion far more powerful than originally predicted and caused wide-spread contamination from radioactive fallout.
