Japan is ordering more tests on rice growing near a crippled nuclear plant after finding elevated levels of radiation, government officials said Saturday.
A sample of unharvested rice contained 500 becquerels of cesium per kilogram, they said.
Radioactive cesium was spewed from the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant after it was damaged by a massive earthquake and tsunami on March 11.
Under Japanese regulations, rice with up to 500 becquerels of cesium per kilogram is considered safe for consumption.
Officials have tested rice from more than 400 spots in Fukushima prefecture. The highest level of cesium previously found was 136 becquerels per kilogram, prefectural official Kazuhiko Kanno said.
News of the elevated radiation level in rice from Nihonmatsu city, 35 miles west of the nuclear plant, set off alarm in the Japanese media.
The government has been testing vegetables and fish for radiation since the disaster, in which backup generators and cooling systems failed at the plant and the cores of three reactors melted.
Some nations have stopped importing some food products from Japan. Japanese consumers are nervous about radiation, but campaigns to buy from Fukushima have drawn support around the nation.
http://www.foxnews.com/health/2011/09/26/japan-finds-radiation-in-rice-more-tests-planned/
Heres another image about the rice issue
Please stay safe. Avoid japanese food. I know its hard given that my and kids & me love it. But we have no choice to! And for those who think that AVA will test a sample, then calculate a confidence level maybe 90% sure there will not be contamination.
Read this:
The precautionary principle (PP) states that if an action or policy has a suspected risk of causing severe harm to the public domain (affecting general health or the environment globally), the action should not be taken in the absence of scientific near-certainty about its safety. Under these conditions, the burden of proof about absence of harm falls on those proposing an action, not those opposing it. PP is intended to deal with uncertainty and risk in cases where the absence of evidence and the incompleteness of scientific knowledge carries profound implications and in the presence of risks of "black swans", unforeseen and unforeseable events of extreme consequence.
This non-naive version of the PP allows us to avoid paranoia and paralysis by confining precaution to specific domains and problems. Here we formalize PP, placing it within the statistical and probabilistic structure of “ruin” problems, in which a system is at risk of total failure, and in place of risk we use a formal"fragility" based approach. In these problems, what appear to be small and reasonable risks accumulate inevitably to certain irreversible harm. Traditional cost-benefit analyses, which seek to quantitatively weigh outcomes to determine the best policy option, do not apply, as outcomes may have infinite costs. Even high-benefit, high-probability outcomes do not outweigh the existence of low probability, infinite cost options—i.e. ruin. Uncertainties result in sensitivity analyses that are not mathematically well behaved. The PP is increasingly relevant due to man-made dependencies that propagate impacts of policies across the globe. In contrast, absent humanity the biosphere engages in natural experiments due to random variations with only local impacts.
Our analysis makes clear that the PP is essential for a limited set of contexts and can be used to justify a limited set of actions. We discuss the implications for nuclear energy and GMOs. GMOs represent a public risk of global harm, while harm from nuclear energy is comparatively limited and better characterized. PP should be used to prescribe severe limits on GMOs.
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8nhAlfIk3QIbGFzOXF5UUN3N2c/preview?pli=1
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