U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission about to stop operating - Will run out of funds this week - "We sincerely regret these actions are necessary" - Scientist: "Yes, I'm worried"

Independent fisheries scientist Alexandra Morton is raising concerns about a disease she says is spreading through Pacific herring causing fish to hemorrhage. Ms. Morton has called on the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans to investigate, saying it could cause large-scale herring kills and infect wild salmon, which feed heavily on herring. "I've been seeing herring with bleeding fins," Ms. Morton said Monday. "Two days ago I did a beach seine on Malcolm Island [near Port McNeill on northern Vancouver Island] and I got approximately 100 of these little herring and they were not only bleeding from their fins, but their bellies, their chins, their eyeballs. These are very, very strong disease symptoms."

Workers at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant have caused a fresh leak of contaminated water by mistakenly detaching a pipe. The plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company, says 6 workers were sprayed with the contaminated water and are being checked for radiation exposure. TEPCO says the workers mistakenly detached a water pipe from a joint near a desalination device on Wednesday morning. The accident caused about 7 tons of contaminated water to leak for about 50 minutes. TEPCO says the water is contained inside a 60-meter-long, 12-meter-wide barrier that surrounds the device. The water is highly radioactive, containing 34 million becquerels of beta ray-emitting material per liter. Worker errors have been occurring frequently at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, as TEPCO struggles to keep the facility under control.

[...] aquarium staff don't know just how far-reaching the "alarming" epidemic has been, and whether this and other sea star species will recover. "They're gone. It's amazing," said Donna Gibbs, a research diver and taxonomist on the aquarium's Howe Sound Research and Conservation group. "Whatever hit them, it was like wildfire and just wiped them out." [...] Aquarium staff don't know the cause because they have had trouble gathering specimens for testing, as starfish that looked healthy in the ocean turned up as goo at the lab. [...] "We're just not sure yet if it's all the same thing," Gibbs said. "They're dying so fast." [...] The collaboration came about after a graduate student collected starfish for a research project and then watched as they "appeared to melt" in her tank. [...] Global News, Oct. 3, 2013: [...] starfish wasting or completely disintegrating ever since early September. "Now they are gone. They have disintegrated, and now there is just goo left," says research diver and taxonomist Donna Gibbs. "So we are trying to see as much as we can really fast and get reports from divers in other areas to see how widespread this is." […] "It is shocking to see them all dead. They are just gone. And, are they coming back? We want them back. B.C. is known for its sea stars. We have more species here than anywhere else in the world." [...]

[...] 238Pu/239+240Pu activity ratios (0.33-2.2) higher than that of global fallout (0.026) were detected at five sites, indicating a possible distribution of Pu related to the accident northwest of the FDNPP. Similarly, using the alpha counting technique, a field survey was made soon after the accident in some heavily contaminated areas outside the 20 km exclusion zone, as well as in Okuma Town adjacent to the plant. The anomaly of the 238Pu/239+240Pu activity ratios (0.059-2.60) indicated the presence of trace amounts of Pu isotopes originating from the accident in soils from Iitate Village and Okuma Town. […]

FDA bans import of food, seafood from 19 perfectures in Japan over radiation