America’s Radiated Drinking Water

By James Donahue

The media appears to have forgotten the story but the Fukushima nuclear plant meltdown continues to spread deadly radiation around the Northern Hemisphere of the world. It is not only in the air we breathe, but now it is found in the ground and in the water we drink.

The questions in the United States now are: how serious is the contamination, do we dare eat the food and drink the water from our taps, and should we wear masks to filter the air we are breathing?

The other big question is what news reports about this problem do we trust?

For example a recent CBS news report admits that Fukushima radiation has reached the west coast of the United States and Canada but "fortunately, between the long journey across the sea and ocean currents that have swirled and stirred the radioactive cesium along the way, the levels are not dangerously high."

The story quoted Ken Buesseler, a senior scientist at The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, as saying that "cesium behaves like dye in water and gets diluted along the way."

Buesseler said there is no need to panic. "I certainly wouldn’t discourage people from swimming or eating fish from the Pacific because of levels that low," he said.

Jonathan Benson, staff writer for Natural News, however, is warning that the toxic levels of radiation are above the old limit once set by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) but that the Obama Administration has recently seen fit to raise that level instead of deal with it.

Benson wrote that since it is "impossible to keep radiation levels below the previously established thresholds . . . the new approach is to continually raise these thresholds so that water can be considered safe."

He wrote that the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) is saying that "the White House’s decision to allow the EPA to alter its official radiation guides make radiation cleanup mandates more lax than they have ever been in the history of the agency’s existence."

With conflicting news reports like these, we are left with an obvious dilemma. Do we trust our government and drink the water coming through our town’s filtration system, which was never designed to deal with radiation, or do we find other water sources? Our recommendation is to choose the latter.

There are several known methods of filtering radiated water. One is to simply purchase jogs of water from a reverse osmosis center, or buy a reverse osmosis filter system for the home.

Another method is to use activated carbon filtration, although once the carbon has reached its limit of absorbing capacity, the filter must be replaced.

A third method is to use sodium filled water softeners that removes contaminants through ion exchange.

Distilled water does not necessarily remove radiated particles.