Fukushima Daiichi nuclear incident

"Landep News"
Months have passed since the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear incident. The worst of the crisis has been over for some time, but people are still very concerned about contamination of the food supply. It is a serious issue, and one that deserves attention. Unfortunately, there is a lot of misinformation out there. Many people seem to be operating under the assumption that food safety tests aren’t being conducted, or that test data is being hidden from the public.
It’s a view that is reflected in this quote from a Japanese restaurant owner, which appeared in a recent article on Slate.com:

“The government of Japan has to step up and declare what the real situation is. They need to tell everyone—Japanese, and the international community—the truth about what food is contaminated, and what the real dangers are. Then we need to stop selling Japanese food outside of the country. We need to sell our food only to ourselves, for three to five years.”

The article’s author, Daisann McLane, made no attempt to verify the statement. She just included the quote and left readers to guess about whether the Japanese government was really hiding “the truth” about radiation. Since there are few English language articles that adequately explain the food testing system, many readers may have assumed the Japanese government wasn’t releasing food safety data.
In fact, the Japanese government is releasing food safety data. Hundreds of tests are conducted each day and results are released to the general public. At the time of this posting, dozens of cases of contamination had been reported to the public. There are still no known cases of the government knowingly hiding data about food the failed the tests, nor is there evidence that authorities have deliberately avoided testing food that would likely be contaminated.
Here is a Japanese TV news report that provides a detailed explanation of the situation. I have written an English language summary of its main points (for those who don’t want to sit through 17 minutes of video):
The TV network conducts a survey of 80 people and finds that a lot of them are concerned about the safety of the food they are eating. They are especially worried about the long term health risks of eating food that might be contaminated.
They provide an example of how many food safety tests are being conducted. Between August 25th to August 31st, 2121 radiation tests were conducted (about 300 each day). Only 18 of the tests found levels of cesium that exceeded safety standards.
The national government has ordered 17 prefectures to test levels of Tests are conducted by authorities in each prefecture, and data is sent to the Ministry of Agriculture, which makes all of the data public. They also include the results from tests conducted by National Institute of Health Sciences. Daily results can be found on this web site. PDF files include information on the localities where food was produced, as well as the names of the laboratories that conducted the tests. The data is not presented in a Pass/Fail format: even if radiation is measured at a level far below safety limits, the amount of radiation is reported to the public.
Their reporter visits Ibaraki prefecture for a firsthand look at how fish is tested for radiation. Ibaraki has been conducting regular tests on 63 different varieties of seafood. Authorities try to spread out the locations from which test fish are taken, to get a wider view of the situation. When fish from a certain area passes a safety check, authorities issue certificates of safety, which can be displayed to potential buyers. The certificates are only valid for a limited time, and must be re-issued whenever a new test is conducted.
Tests are conducted in a uniform manner, following strict regulations. The rules state that the test must be conducted on the meat portion of the fish. The scales and bones need to be removed from the sample. According to the Ministry of Agriculture, the rules reflect the fact that the meat part of the fish is the most easily contaminated.
The testing system’s main limitation is the lack of equipment. There are only a handful of labs that have machinery that can conduct the tests, and they’re all running on emergency 24/hour testing schedules. The same labs must conduct daily tests of the water supply. The one lab they visited had used its four machines to conduct about four tests a day prior to March 11th. Now it has to conduct about a hundred tests a day. Each test takes about an hour.
Fishermen and fishery companies are frustrated with the current testing system. The limited availability of testing equipment means that tests on certain types of fish can only be conducted two, three, or just one time each week. They would prefer daily tests at every location so they can reassure consumers about the safety of their fish. Because demand is low for shipments that haven’t been tested, some fishermen have scaled back their catches, only bringing them in for sale on days when they know that tests can be conducted.　(On the day the reported visited a fish market in Chiba, fish from their haul of Japanese sardines was found to contain 12.1 becquerels per kilogram of cesium, far below the safety limit of 500.)
After discussing seafood, the report moves on to beef and milk. As many of you know, beef shipments from parts of Tohoku were banned earlier this summer after tests found levels of cesium that exceeded safety standards. Milk shipments from some of the same areas were not banned. This is because the milk did not contain high levels of cesium. Dairy farmers had been feeding their cows using straw that had been stored indoors, whereas meat farms had been feeding their cows straw that had been stacked outdoors.

In Ibaraki prefecture, radiation tests on milk are conducted on a biweekly basis. Milk is trucked from various farms to cooler stations. Samples are taken from every truck and mixed together. If the mixed samples fails the safety test, shipments from the entire region will be banned. On the day that the TV crew visited one cooler station, no radioactive contamination was detected in the milk. ( The safety limit for cesium in milk is 200 becquerels per liter – the testing machinery is capable of detecting cesium if it exceeds 20 becquerels per liter.)
After the report, the anchors discuss the issue in their news studio. They mention how prefectural governments have been frustrated by the national government’s instructions, which do not go into minute detail about the types of food that need to be tested and how often the tests need to be conducted. Consumers would obviously prefer that every shipment of every type of food be tested, but that is not realistic. Many of the machines used to test radiation are imported, and there is now a huge worldwide demand for the equipment. Japan may want to buy many more testing machines, but it won’t be able to get them soon.
Dr. Minoru Kamata, an expert on Chernobyl, recommends that agricultural cooperatives do more to develop testing at a local level. He says that Ukrainians who lived near the Chernobyl area can easily get vegetables from their gardens tested for contamination, and he hopes that Japan could achieve something similar.
— tl;dr summary: Food is being tested for radiation in Japan. The government posts all the results online. Producers and consumers would like more tests, but limited availability of testing machines means that it’s impossible to test everything.
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