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@elainekirk Now THAT would have been a plan, but of course, way too expensive for anything but pie-in-the-sky pronouncements to be abandoned a few weeks later.

OK... I have to go... obviously my cynicism buffers are over-run. ;)

@lillymunster Scanning the animals is not enough. They must collect samples and have them thoroughly analysed in order to know how deep the contamination goes and that takes a long time. Best thing to do, in my opinion, is having all these animals quarantined until they can make a scientific assessment. There's always going to be economical repercussions and they won't dissipate in the near future. Lets hope health concerns are put ahead of economical concerns.

@elainekirk My money is on a patch job.

EU agrees to bury nuclear waste in secure bunkers
The new rules force national nuclear authorities to draw up disposal plans by 2015, which will be vetted by Europe's energy commissioner Guenther Oettinger.
Oettinger's team, which will vet the national strategies, has already stated its preference for "deep geological repositories" -- caverns to be built in clay or granite rocks between 100 and 700 meters underground.
"At present, such deep geological repositories do not exist anywhere in the world nor is a repository in construction outside of the EU," said Oettinger's team. "It takes currently a minimum of 40 years to develop and build one."
More: www.reuters.com

Elaine it continues to amaze me how many people don't care and don't want to talk about it. I guess it has to happen in their own backyard to make any impact.

@RadioGuy betting most people would avoid rad tuna.... I just wanted to dissagree. If "most" people hear from gov or news that it isn't a threat, even if radioactive, then most "sheeple" will still eat it. People and Sheeple rely on democratic, elected gov to protect them.The world just has to many hazards, outside the scope of self protection, for people to worry about, they get overwhelmed. This obviously doesn't apply to inquisitive minds or activists, but my experience is that most people are not inquisitive. They are more concerned with a Single possible child killer than they are with threats (that they don't understand) to large numbers of people.

@RBeaner Hence the caveat: if they believe the source of the radiation testing.

@elainekirk Oh they absolutely expect that. Otherwise everything is suspect.

(Depending how tight their storage is for the grain.)

Unfortunately, there's no equivalent filtering for radioactive grain.

It depends when it's planted. If you think of the grasses around you, they've all seeded already, right? If barley is planted in the fall, just after the previous harvest, it can over-winter and then it's harvestable as early as May.

@lillymunster Here's what I found on it. www.scribd.com
The scribd document formats badly for me but it pastes OK, so here's the pertinent part.

Until recently, barley and wheat, grown in most parts of Japan as winter grains, have been second only to rice in their importance as food staples of the Japanese people. Along with brown rice, the taste of cooked rice and barley was something dear to Japanese farmers. Yet these winter grains are today in the process of vanishing from Japanese soil.

As recently as fifteen or twenty years ago, the paddy field was not neglected after the rice harvest in the fall; something was always grown there during the winter months. Farmers knew that productivity per unit area of paddy was never better than when a summer rice crop was followed by a crop of barley or wheat in the winter. As soon as the rice was harvested in the fall, the paddy field was plowed, ridges formed, and the barley or wheat seed sown. This was done because winter grain was thought to have a poor resistance to moisture.

It was neither money nor labor that supported the arduous practice of double cropping paddy fields with wheat or barley. It was pride. The farmer, afraid of being called lazy or wasteful if he left his fields fallow over the winter, plowed every inch of available Japanese soil. So when the farming authorities started saying that nobody had any need for expensive wheat and talking about a euthanasia of domestic wheat production, this knocked the moral support out from under the farmer, speeding his physical and spiritual downfall. Over the past five years or so, wheat and barley production has almost disappeared in some localities.