Elevated radiation levels found in food

March 20, 2011 at 12:00a.m.

Los Angeles Times

MIYAKO, Japan

As engineers moved closer to possibly restoring vital cooling systems for overheating reactors Saturday, the government confronted more bad news from Japan’s nuclear crisis — radiation contamination has been found in some food and water supplies.

Although Japan’s health ministry said the levels were not immediately harmful to humans, the discovery of higher-than-normal radioactivity in batches of milk and spinach near the crippled Dai-ichi nuclear plant in Fukushima prefecture was almost certain to stir new angst in a Japanese public already weary from earthquake aftershocks, blackouts and fears of an outright nuclear-reactor meltdown.

That announcement was followed by reports late Saturday that traces of radioactive iodine were found in tap water in Tokyo and other parts of the country.

“This is the expected next development,” said Dr. Glenn D. Braunstein, chairman of the department of medicine at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, referring to the tainted foods. After the Chernobyl nuclear-power-plant disaster in the Ukraine in 1986, he said, a major cause of the thyroid disease suffered by children came from consumption of contaminated food.

“There are two routes to radiation exposure: One is breathing it in, and the other is swallowing it through food stuffs,” he said. Other experts warned that contamination may also turn up in fish — a staple of the Japanese diet.

A series of disasters has been battering Japan after a record-setting 9-magnitude earthquake struck March 11. A tsunami after the quake slammed into the northeastern coast, killing more than 7,600 people and leaving more than 11,000 unaccounted for, according to current official estimates. The massive waves also knocked out cooling systems at the nuclear plant, causing the complex to leak radiation.

Saturday’s new health concerns arose as more food and supplies reached some tsunami-stricken areas on the northeast coast and as firefighters and Japan’s Self-Defense Forces worked frantically to contain a still-unfolding disaster at the nuclear facility in Fukushima, about 150 miles to the north of Tokyo.

In one potentially important development, officials said they hoped to connect power lines as early as today that would restore operations to cooling equipment at damaged reactors 1 and 2.

“This is an absolutely necessary step ... to reactivate the [reactors’] normal cooling systems,” said Hidehiko Nishiyama, a spokesman for Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial and Safety Agency.

Edwin Lyman of the Union of Concerned Scientists was more circumspect. Getting power restored “could be good, but I don’t think it is a sure thing at all. All the reactors were exposed to shock, so who knows if the piping is still intact?”

Nonetheless, he added, “any glimmer of hope is good news.”

The damage to the Nos. 1, 2 and 3 reactors includes swelling of the fuel rods — they expand like balloons, which could block the channels of coolant between them.

Firetrucks on Saturday also continued to dump tons of water on the plant’s No. 3 reactor in hopes of averting a meltdown.