Cruise finds Fukushima pollution
[link to www.bbc.co.uk]

[snip]

The cruise carried researchers from the US, UK, France, Spain and Japan. Conducted just three months after the Fukushima crisis began, it was intended as an "independent check" on Japanese government-funded research and the information released by Tepco, the owners of the beleaguered Daiichi plant in Fukushima.

The researchers have some qualifications about their own research, the most significant of which is that they were not permitted any closer than 30km to the coast, where higher levels of radioactivity would have been observable.

It is clear also, 11 months on from the accident, that Fukushima-originated radioactivity levels in the seawater are not declining as fast as many scientists would have hoped.

"The reactor site still seems to be leaking; it hasn't shut off completely, and at those levels right on the coast you could still have these concentration factors that we measured that would indicate some organisms would be at levels unfit for human consumption," Dr Buesseler said.

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