The Fake Fukushima Radiation Scare Stories That Are Going Viral On the Internet.

If you were to visit the websites of the likes of Alex Jones or Mike Adams you’d be scared shitless that California is being irradiated by Fukushima nuclear fallout. PolicyMic tries to squash the concerns of millions of Americans.

We’re linking to (but not necessarily endorsing) their take on the issue here, but we welcome and expect contrary views in the comments:

The news: A few suspect news stories have been making the rounds on the internet in recent days, suggesting that radiation from the Fukushima power plant disaster has hit the West Coast of the United States and is causing major harm to the Pacific Ocean off California. Most pernicious is the report from NaturalNews.com that a scientific study found a significant drop off in sea life in the Pacific Ocean near the U.S. coast.

So should you trust these scare stories? Absolutely not. 

The fine folks at Deep Sea News — which features writers with academic degrees, actual professional credentials, and expert knowledge — are doing their best to debunk the rumors spreading about Fukushima radiation and its impact on the U.S.

Take the dangers of radiation hitting California. Will it kill you? Are we all going to die? DSN has your answer: “No it will not be dangerous … It’s not even dangerous to swim off the coast of Fukushima.”

If you went swimming in the waters right next to the actual power plant, you would only experience “0.03% of the daily radiation an average Japanese resident receives.”

So I’m thinking everybody in the U.S. will be OK.

But back to that story about sea life dying in droves off the California coast: what’s going on? The Natural News article cites an actual study with scientific evidence published in a real academic journal. There has to be some truth to the fact that “the number of dead sea creatures blanketing the floor of the Pacific is higher than it has ever been in the 24 years that monitoring has taken place, a phenomenon that the data suggests is a direct consequence of nuclear fallout from Fukushima.”

If true, that’s pretty freaking scary. That means radiation from Fukushima is killing off mass amounts of sea creatures right off the U.S. coast. The only problem is that the study the article cites contains no actual mention of Fukushima. In fact, the study offers a perfectly logical explanation for the mass die-offs: a natural cycle of increasing and decreasing levels of algae and other sea life depending on climate and the seasons.

The study’s findings even cite trends that began five years before the Fukushima disaster occurred. Indeed, the study’s authors have gone out of their way to be very clear: “There is no indication that any of the events in this study were associated with the Fukushima nuclear accident.” …

[continues at PolicyMic]