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Three months after making the wildly overblown claim that a second nuclear emergency at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant would require the evacuation of the North American West Coast, environmentalist David Suzuki said he “regrets” the comments.

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Nevertheless, the Nature of Things host did not seem to go so far as to renege the claim, which has baffled nuclear scientists.

“I regret having said it, although my sense of potential widespread disaster remains and the need for an urgent international response to dealing with the spent rods at Fukushima remains,” wrote Mr. Suzuki in an email to The Province, which was compiling a feature on myths surrounding the 2011 Japanese tsunami.

He also said that it was “an off-the-cuff response.”

The comment first arose when Mr. Suzuki was speaking at an October 30 event on public water policy at the University of Alberta. At one point, Mr. Suzuki began discussing the tsunami-damaged Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, in particular the spent fuel rods housed at the plant’s explosion-damaged Reactor Number 4.