On a sunny lunch hour last June, Tricia Stevens and one of her colleagues from Lush, a cosmetics company with offices in Vancouver, British Columbia, headed to the beach with a collapsible five-gallon jug, a funnel, two zip ties, and a red plastic crate with a prepaid U.P.S. shipping label. They waded into Burrard Inlet and filled the jug with seawater (the same seawater that gives Lush’s Sea Spray Hair Mist its pep), then sealed it up and sent it across the continent, to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, in Massachusetts, where it was tested for radiation. A week later, the results were in: Stevens’s sample had a cesium-137 level of 0.4 becquerels per cubic metre, making it about two thousand times less radioactive than the average banana.
The good news for Stevens, and for the more skittish consumers of her company’s products, was that, besides containing very little cesium-137, her sample showed none of the isotope cesium-134. Whereas cesium-137, which has a half-life of thirty years, has been present in the oceans, in some degree, since the nuclear-weapons tests of the fifties and sixties, cesium-134, which has a half-life of only two years, is a result of far more recent contamination—namely, the 2011 meltdown at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. The fallout from that accident, more than ninety per cent of which ended up in the Pacific, took nearly four years to reach North American waters. Earlier this year, it made landfall in the small town of Ucluelet, British Columbia, where a dockside sample registered 1.4 becquerels per cubic metre of the telltale cesium-134 and about fifteen times the cesium-137 levels of Stevens’s test.
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.
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