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“We haven’t been able to detect changes in the amount of these artificial isotopes that are in our Pacific salmon and steelhead trout or shellfish that we’ve collected all up and down the coast,” he said.

Contamination levels were about one-tenth of what was seen in the north Pacific in the late 1950s and 60s before the ban of above-ground nuclear weapons testing, primarily by the United States and the former Soviet Union, Cullen said.

“Now what we see are levels that are similar to what we had in our part of the Pacific back in the 1970s,” he said, adding those did not approach amounts believed to be harmful.

He said scientists now know that most of the radioactive contamination reached offshore British Columbia in 2015 and 2016, as predicted by ocean circulation models.

Citizen scientists have helped collect monthly samples of sea water and annually gather fish and shellfish samples for analysis, he said.

Cullen also leads a network called Fukushima InFORM, or Integrated Fukushima Ocean Radionuclide Monitoring.

The network monitors marine radioactivity at distances up to 1,500 kilometres off the coast of British Columbia and brings together Canadian and American scientists, health experts and non-governmental organizations.

“A Canadian monitoring program for the sampling and analysis of seawater for Fukushima radioactivity was initiated shortly after the accident and in the U.S., crowdfunding and ships of opportunity were used to monitor the progress and arrival of Fukushima plume along the coast,” the study says.