Is Radioactive Water Worth Worrying About?

Whether any of this actually matters depends on whom you ask. “There’s a nuclear-power side that’s very quick to be dismissive and say, ‘Don’t worry your pretty little heads, you’re not in harm’s way,’ ” Ken Buesseler, a marine-chemistry researcher at Woods Hole and the organizer of the sampling initiative, told me. “The flip side are the people screaming, you know, ‘Stay out of the Pacific, don’t swim in Monterey, I’m going to move, tell your friends, this is a catastrophe!’ ” At the levels detected in Ucluelet, Buesseler has calculated, you’d need to swim six hours a day for a thousand years to get the radiation equivalent of a dental X-ray.