U.S. authorities are stepping up their effort to prevent Japanese foods possibly contaminated by radiation from reaching consumers in this country.
As the Associated Press reports, the Food and Drug Administration is banning the sale of food from the part of Japan racked by the crisis at the Fuskushima Daiichi nuclear plant, which has spewed radiation following this month’s massive earthquake and tsunami. The FDA said that it will allow food from other Japanese regions onto U.S. grocery shelves, but only after being screened for radiation.
Officials at the agency, which previously said it simply would monitor Japanese food and pharmaceutical imports, emphasized that they still don’t think the levels of radiation are sufficient to endanger the food supply.
Batches of raw milk, rapeseed and spinach with elevated radiation levels have been detected in Japan. The same has been the case with rain, dust and seawater, spurring worries that the health risks are higher than previously acknowledged. NPR reports that the rising levels of radiation in tap water in Tokyo triggered a call from authorities to avoid the use of the water in baby formula.
Japan’s crisis also has highlighted a failing in U.S. nuclear safety standards. At the Fukushima plant, radioactive waste stored in small cooling pools next to the reactors overheated and probably leaked radiation into the environment.
In the U.S., the Los Angeles Times reports, even more radioactive waste is stashed away that way — and is vulnerable in the event of an accident — because the federal government has failed for decades to find permanent storage sites for used-up nuclear fuel rods.
“The pools in Fukushima were not filled to capacity, and the accident could have been a lot worse if they were filled as densely as ours are,” Edwin Lyman, a physicist with the Union of Concerned Scientists, told the Times.
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