Canadian Fish Eaters Threatened by Fukushima Radiation: Anti-Nuclear Group
By Alex Roslin, For Postmedia News January 14, 2012
“After the world’s worst nuclear accident in 25 years, authorities in Canada said people living here were safe and faced no health risks from the fallout from Fukushima.
They said most of the radiation from the crippled Japanese nuclear power plant would fall into the ocean, where it would be diluted and not pose any danger.
Dr. Dale Dewar wasn’t convinced. Dewar, a family physician in Wynyard, Sask., doesn’t eat a lot of seafood herself, but when her grandchildren come to visit, she carefully checks seafood labels.
She wants to make sure she isn’t serving them anything that might come from the western Pacific Ocean.
Dewar, the executive director of Physicians for Global Survival, a Canadian anti-nuclear group, says the Canadian government has downplayed the radiation risks from Fukushima and is doing little to monitor them.
“We suspect we’re going to see more cancers, decreased fetal viability, decreased fertility, increased metabolic defects — and we expect them to be generational,” she said.
Evidence has emerged that the impacts of the disaster on the Pacific Ocean are worse than expected.” [...]
Radioactive Iodine in Rainwater: Public Was in the Dark
By ALEX ROSLIN, The Gazette, Jan. 14, 2012
But last March, a Health Canada monitoring station in Calgary detected an average of 8.18 becquerels per litre of radioactive iodine (an isotope released by the nuclear accident) in rainwater, the data shows.
The level easily exceeded the Canadian guideline of six becquerels of iodine per litre for drinking water, acknowledged Eric Pellerin, chief of Health Canada’s radiation-surveillance division.
“It’s above the recommended level (for drinking water),” he said in an interview. “At any time you sample it, it should not exceed the guideline.”
Canadian authorities didn’t disclose the high radiation reading at the time.” [...]
Read more at: http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/Radioactive+iodine+rainwater+Public+dark/5995357/story.html
The Debate in Canada: What Is a ‘Safe’ Level of Radiation?
By Alex Roslin, Special to The Gazette January 13, 2012
“The fallout from Fukushima has sparked debate about how Canada monitors radiation and how it decides what is a “safe” level of radiation.
Canadian authorities have insisted that Canadians are safe and that dangerous levels of radiation haven’t entered our food, air or water.
“The amount (of radiation) detected would not pose a health risk to Canadians,” Health Canada spokesman Stéphane Shank said.
“Canadians are safe. We are within the natural background radiation fluctuations that were typically seen prior to the nuclear event in Japan.”
But nuclear critics Dr. Dale Dewar and Gordon Edwards say Ottawa’s notion of what is a “safe” level of radiation can still cause serious health risks for some people.
In fact, Canada’s ceiling for radiation in food is set at a level that would lead to 5,000 to 8,000 cancers per million people over a 70-year lifetime of exposure, according to Health Canada’s models and those of a 2006 U.S. National Academy of Sciences report on cancer risk from radiation. (About half of the cancers would be fatal.)
That works out to 170,000 to 270,000 lifetime cancers if all 34 million Canadians were exposed at the “safe” level.” [...]
