Don’t Worry … Be Happy
The CBC reports on a Japanese government announcement: Japan food radiation above safety limit
Spinach and milk from two regions near Japan’s stricken nuclear plant are showing radiation levels above the legal safety limit, a Japanese official said Saturday.
But Yukio Edano, the chief cabinet secretary, said a person would have to drink the milk for a year to ingest as much radiation as in a CT scan. A year of the spinach would amount to about one-fifth of a CT scan.
“It’s not like if you ate it right away you would be harmed,” Edano told reporters in Tokyo as Japan’s nuclear crisis entered its second week. “It would not be good to continue to eat it for some time.”
…The contaminated milk was found 30 kilometres from the troubled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex, and the spinach was collected between 80 and 100 kilometres to the south, Edano told reporters in Tokyo.
If there is radiation in the milk, the cows and pastures are irradiated, and the level is much higher for them to have it still detected in the milk. One doesn’t normally schedule cows for regular CT scans. Further, milk is normally ingested daily by children, and it is used, by definition, as the basic ingredient for all dairy products.
In addition, “between 80 and 100 kilometres to the south” is not near to the site, and is well outside the warning zone. No one wants their food enriched with caesium-137.
