State health officials say the most recent round of Alaska seafood testing in 2015 has found no radiation from the Fukushima nuclear disaster that followed a 9.0 earthquake in 2011.
That earthquake on March 11, 2011, generated a 130-foot tsunami that killed about 16,000 people and damaged the nuclear complex in a way that officials were concerned could potentially contaminate Alaska fish.
Marlena Brewer with the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation says multiple state, federal, and international agencies just finished conducting the same testing as in 2014 to check for radionuclides from Fukushima.
Brewer: “There were no detections of those radionuclides.”
King, chum, sockeye, and pink salmon along with halibut, pollock, sablefish, and Pacific cod were sampled from commercial processors around Alaska to be tested by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Brewer says the DEC will always maintain the fish monitoring program where tests are conducted to check for contaminants however she says this is the last year scheduled to inspect for Fukushima related radiation.
Brewer: “2015 is when they were expected to peak, from now on they are expected to continuously decline.”
Water quality data from a crowd-funded project spearheaded by the non-profit Cook Inletkeeper also appears to support this conclusion.
In 2014, they tested waters in Lower Cook Inlet in for radiation, and the results reported were also non-detect for Fukushima-related radiation.