In August this year, greenling fish containing 25,800 becquerels of radioactive cesium per kilogram were caught in waters within a 20-km radius of the Fukushima I nuclear power station. The level of contamination is more than 250 times in excess of the food safety standards set by the Japanese government, and it is the highest cesium concentration ever found in fish. Although Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) has been investigating sea water and seabed soil from this area over the past four months, it has found no significant differences from other sea areas and thus the causes of the contamination remain unknown. Amid the ongoing effort by local fishermen to voluntarily restrain their fishing operations in waters off the coast of Fukushima Prefecture and the continuing shipment restrictions imposed by the government, the fact that greenling highly contaminated with cesium were caught at a certain spot for unknown reasons is having a grave impact on the local fishing industry.
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