“Chum salmon coming in from Japan will travel within 400 miles of B.C.’s west coast, twice the distance commercial fisheries are allowed to go.” Fisheries and Oceans Canada Graphic.
Since the 1970s, local fisheries are not permitted to fish in international waters. Wild salmon that travels from the radiation affected waters of Japan shouldn’t have an impact on the local BC fisheries, according to the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans.
The North Pacific Anadromous Fish Commission, a local research group, found:
Based on nearly 50 years of salmon migratory research, the commission concludes that while Japanese Chum salmon travel within 400 miles of the B.C. coast, that is still twice the distance local fisheries are allowed to go. …[D]espite the restriction zone, most fisheries commonly focus in the river mouths where the salmon are spawned, further reducing any risk of contamination.
As previously determined, there are minute amounts of radiation that have been detected in our precipitation and our ocean water, but the amounts are “less than naturally occurring levels of radiation in the rain”, suggests Health Canada. There are six existing atmospheric monitoring stations in B.C., as well as nine new monitoring stations set up along Canada’s West coast, as a precautionary measure. [Read full article].