BEIJING: Chinese authorities have detected extremely low levels of radiation from Japan's crippled nuclear power plant on spinach grown in parts of China, but the amount of contamination posed no health hazard, the government said.
The health ministry issued a statement late Wednesday saying tests on the vegetable grown outdoors in Beijing, the northern city of Tianjin and in the central province of Henan had revealed traces of radioactive iodine-131.
Recent rainfall caused radioactive particles in the air to accumulate on the spinach leaves, the ministry said.
"It has been proven that washing the spinach with water can effectively remove radioactive materials," it said.
The amount was one to three thousandths of the legal limit stipulated in China's national radiation safety standard, the official Xinhua news agency said, citing the National Nuclear Emergency Coordination Committee.
It is the first report of domestic grown produce being contaminated with radiation since Beijing ordered tests on food and water last month in the wake of the disaster at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi plant, the China Daily said.
China has detected 10 cases of radioactive contamination among passengers, aircraft, ships and containers arriving from Japan since March 16, quarantine authorities said on Saturday
A vast field of debris, swept out to sea following the Japan earthquake and tsunami, is floating towards the U.S. West Coast, it emerged today.
More than 200,000 buildings were washed out by the enormous waves that followed the 9.0 quake on March 11.
There have been reports of cars, tractor-trailers, capsized ships and even whole houses bobbing around in open water.
But even more grizzly are the predictions of U.S. oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer, who is expecting human feet, still in their shoes, to wash up on the West Coast within three years.
'I'm expecting parts of houses, whole boats and feet in sneakers to wash up,' Mr Ebbesmeyer, a Seattle oceanographer who has spent decades tracking flotsam, told MailOnline.
Members of the U.S. Navy's 7th fleet, who spotted the extraordinary floating rubbish, say they have never seen anything like it and are warning the debris now poses a threat to shipping traffic.
'It's very challenging to move through these to consider these boats run on propellers and that these fishing nets or other debris can be dangerous to the vessels that are actually trying to do the work,' Ensign Vernon Dennis told ABC News.
Scientists say the first bits of debris from Japan are due to reach the West Coast in a year's time after being carried by currents toward Washington, Oregon and California.
They will then turn toward Hawaii and back again toward Asia, circulating in what is known as the North Pacific gyre, said Mr Ebbesmeyer,
Mr Ebbesmeyer, who has traced Nike sneakers, plastic bath toys and hockey gloves accidentally spilled from Asia cargo ships, is now tracking the massive debris field moving across the Pacific Ocean from Japan.
He relies heavily on a network of thousands of beachcombers to report the location and details of their finds.
At 12:10 a.m., Tokyo Electric Power Co, operator of the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, announced that the latest quake has had no influence on the facility. Elsewhere the news is more worrisome. NHK says power cuts are occurring at the Onagawa nuclear power plant in Miyagi Pref., north of Fukushima, although radiation levels around the plant remain unchanged so far.
At 12:23 a.m. the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, an arm of the Japanese government, began holding an emergency press conference. An official said external sources of electricity have been cut to both the Higashi-Dori nuclear power plant in Aomori Pref and the Rokkasho nuclear recycling plant, which I wrote about in the latest issue of Forbes magazine . Both facilities are in Aomori Prefecture, near the tip of Japan’s main island, and are reportedly operating normally via on-site emergency generators.
A tsunami warning is still in effect along the coast of Miyagi Pref. Despite Tokyo Electric’s assurances, the Fukushima plant warrants close attention, said an expert appearing on NHK.
Interloper wrote:It's so hard to imagine entire ghost towns like that, in a developed and sophisticated country like Japan. To be so utterly unprepared for this kind of disaster... it's just unbelievable. The ancestors who put up markers 600 and more years ago could never have imagined the additional devastation of nuclear radiation; tsunami alone are bad enough.
Even more than prayer, Japanese aid organizations could probably use more cash to help those displaced and devastated by this chain of catastrophes.
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