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The Marine Ecology Research Institute located near the Pacific, in Onjuku, Japan, is testing fish supplies in order to check if it remains safe to eat despite wastewater discharge from the nuclear plants.

The fish is sent to the Onjuku lab by prefectural governments and fishing cooperatives located in the eastern Japan. The fish specimens are photographed, tagged, packed and placed for one hour in a $200,000 germanium semiconductor detector to test for the presence of radioactive isotopes iodine, Cesium-137 and 134, according to the international press.

“It takes an hour to run a test,” Atsushi Suginaka, director of the fisheries processing industries and marketing division of Japan’s Fisheries Agency said. Unlike rice or other farm products, “fish are internally contaminated, so it is time-consuming to check.”

For detecting the presence of strontium it takes one month for every single fish sample.

After the Fukushima nuclear accident in 2011, if there are detected more than 100 bequerels per kilogram of fish, then an automatic ban is activated.

Three months after the nuclear catastrophe hit Japan in March 2011, 53 percent of fish sampled off Fukushima showed radiation levels surpassing the safety limit of 100 bequerels per kilogram. By 2012, only half of the analyzed fish was contaminated and by November 2013, only 2.2 percent of samples tested unsafe, the media says.

There are species that cannot be radiated around Fukushima, such as mollusks, squid and octopus, because “they do not have backbones and tend to accumulate less radioactive substances,” explained Atsushi Suginaka, of the Fisheries Agency.