 One bingo, one o'clock rocker, I'm so happy to be here with Henrietta Doolai. Welcome to the show Henrietta. Thank you, glad to be here. I should like to call you Dr. Henrietta. Henrietta is fine. So Henrietta is a very special person first because she has the same first name that my grandmother had that makes a special, you know, an issue that's important. But the other is that she's an associate professor at the Department of Geology and Geophysics at Southwest, the School of Ocean and Earth Science at UH Manoa. And she's studying and working in radioisotopes and coastal hydrology. That's why we're calling this show Fukushima Fingerprints coming to Hawaii. You'll see what I mean in a minute. So tell us what you do, Henrietta. So I, because of my education, I learned to use radioactive elements to study earth processes. Specifically, I focus about water, the water cycle, how it flows from the land to the ocean, what happens to different chemicals than within the ocean. What can we learn about ocean currents and how the chemicals coming from the land to the ocean by water flow support biology and other processes in the ocean. That's it? In a nutshell. Let me read this. But then it goes too much wider. Henrietta Dulai is a geochemist who uses chemical tracers, that's always exciting, to study coastal hydrology and biogeochemistry. I never heard that one before. In this episode, we hear about her use of radiochemistry. I never heard that one either. To investigate the dispersion of Fukushima-derived radioisotopes in the Pacific. That's really exciting. You're in a top 4% of exciting scientists. Wow, exciting. So, what is with all of these radio things and radioactive, I guess that means? What are you working on in terms of Fukushima? Right, so I alluded to the hydrology part and as you just said, that's my everyday what keeps me busy and it's fun that I use natural radioactivity to learn about processes. But then when Fukushima happened, I thought, okay, this is something we have to follow up on and how can we use all the radionuclides, not just to learn how bad or what are the levels of radioactivity from Fukushima that came to us, but also to learn about ocean currents or precipitation patterns and other information that these radionuclides help us learn about. You're learning about the processes by which these things, these radioactive elements are carried around the Pacific. Correct. Before the show, I was telling you, I'm so impressed with So West and UH Manoa. We know so much about the Pacific. We know everything. Well, everything there is to know about the Pacific. And you're just one of the parts of that at So West. We know the weather. We know the water. We know the air. We know the biochemistry of the ocean. We know the bottom of the ocean, the top of the ocean. Even on this show, sitting in that chair, we have learned so much about what goes on in the Pacific Ocean. There's a lot to learn, but UH Manoa is really on top of it. I'm so impressed with that. You want to know this. You want to know. You'll be, you know, you'll admire Henrietta and all her colleagues that study the Pacific Ocean know so much about it. So, okay. So we're going to find out what happened to all that radioactive debris that was drifting off Fukushima. What's the path it takes? So let me stop right there to tease that question apart. Yes. There was a tsunami that released a debris and that debris started moving offshore with the currents taking them and diluting the patch, but it traveled along. The garbage patch referred to affectionately by the scientific community as the garbage patch. Yes. And the Fukushima power plant disaster happened a few days after the tsunami. So the leakage of the radionuclide started on the 12th, 13th, and 40th of March. So the patch or the plume moved a little bit offshore already where most of the deposition happened. So the debris itself did not carry much radioactivity on it. Only what fell on it. So it wasn't soaking in the discharged waters much. So we have tested different items that were caught that were shown to originate from Japan, never found any significant levels of Fukushima-derived radioactivity on them. So the plume itself, the debris was not... What is a plume? I defined a plume as a consolidated or organized patch that travels with the current. Okay. And before we get too much further off that, why does the plume stay together? What are the physical processes that keep it together in a plume? So processes in the ocean that are not just major big currents that move the plume, but then smaller eddies that cause smaller scale mixing would disperse the debris. So that would make it dissipate, eventually mix. Eventually it will be dissipated. So we're going to stay together forever. Well, eventually it will reach the North Pacific garbage patch. Which is the biggest... Which is within the gyre. The gyre. That's the gyre. And that's located northeast of Hawaii and in the Lee of Alaska there and the Pacific Northwest, right? Correct. They probably don't like having it around. No one does. Like to have garbage in their backyard. Correct. How far offshore is it saved from Alaska or the Pacific Northwest? So we are talking about thousands of miles, but it shifts. And so all the debris that are not sure of the islands get some of it is coming from that. And the gyre, it implies that it's moving in some kind of circle, some kind of whirlpool effect. Yes, that is... That's the way the Pacific works in that area. Yes. And it gathers the patch. Yes. And so these currents, the same currents were the ones that carried the Fukushima-derived radionuclides, all the ones that get released from the power plants and deposited from the atmosphere. So these currents would then carry the radionuclides that were dissolved. So not as particles or something hard to touch. It's dissolved. So the currents would carry these radionuclides across the Pacific. So they're just in the water. They're dissolved. They make salt. When you put salt in the water, the potassium, the sodium, they all dissolve and that flow with the currents. You can sponsor them. I mean, you can see them. You can spot them with instruments. You can spot them with radioactive, sensitive radio sensors or something. That's the choice that scientists use. So physical oceanographers, for example, try to understand the currents based on their temperature and salinity. What we did is there is no sensor that could look down the earth and say where it's more radioactive than other places. No. Not even an airplane that could fly would be able to detect such low concentrations as we are talking about. Low concentrations. So we had to actually collect thousands and thousands of liters or gallons, if you prefer, of water and individual analyzed samples, concentrating all that radioactivity into a tiny volume, which then was measured with the instruments. How do you do that? So you take a bottle and you scoop up the water and now you have thousands of bottles of water in a given place. Yes. How do you concentrate it? So we specifically focused on cesium isotopes. Those were released from Fukushima and the largest quantities that would directly affect the environment. And so it's also easier to measure and behave differently than iodine, which was also released. So cesium would deposit that deposition from the atmosphere and also was released by water masses. And so we would go to places where we wanted to see whether that cesium plume is there or not. We would take a 100-liter sample, 100 liters, filter it through this tiny column of little beads, organic beads, so organic material that can preferentially capture cesium out of the water. So as the water flows through these beads, the beads collect the cesium, the rest of the water and other ions simply pass through. And then we have the beads that are concentrated, that concentrated out all the cesium from the water. That's radioactive. And so cesium, there were two cesium isotopes released from Fukushima. One has a 30-year half-life, so we'll be around with us for another 100 years or so. And the other has a two-year half-life, cesium-134, which decays... So we're doing five half-lives. Yeah, so we're done... Not yet. Not yet. So it's been only two-and-a-half half-lives. So it takes about five half-lives, so 10 years. Oh, I see, I see. Two or three to really go. Ready to go. And if you went, say, to the Atlantic Ocean, but they didn't have Fukushima, and you started making the same collection, you'd probably be able to find some cesium there, too. Oh, definitely. Yeah. So the cesium story in the ocean started in the 50s when we were testing nuclear weapons above ground, blowing up atolls and so forth. Like the Keeney Island. Exactly. So there is, yes, a big environmental problem that was not planned. There's a book by Simon Winchester from the East-West Center called Pacific. Just the word Pacific. And the first chapter in this book is the detailed discussion of what happened at the Keeney. It will make you sick to read this. Make anybody sick. Pacific by Simon Winchester. It's worth getting it. Amazon, yeah. Sorry. Right. So a lot of cesium was released already in the late 50s and early 60s, and that cesium is still around with us. And so back then, huge amounts of cesium were dispersed. The same kind that was released from Fukushima, but because of the differences in half-life, the short one has been gone, right? So within 10 years or so, the other one is still around, and we can detect it all around the world. Not just in the ocean, but on land also. And all this from the cesium at Fukushima? No, no, no. I'm talking about the nuclear weapons. Oh, I'm talking about the Keeney. Oh, so it's dispersed from there. And that's what? How many years ago? 60, 70, 60 years ago. Yes. And then Chernobyl added a little bit to that. But other sources also, man-made sources, so reprocessing plants released some of the cesium into, like, cellar field, into the Irish Sea. Do I care about cesium? For example, if the waiter comes and he says, how would you like your martini? I would say, you know, put a little cesium in there. Would I want cesium in my martini? Probably there is some already in there. Oh, no, don't say that. But that's the point here, that the message I would like to take, to get across that, yes, we are aware that radioactivity is harmful, yet we have been living with it all around us forever because there are these natural radionuclides that probably have higher levels of radioactivity than the cesium. And I don't mean to say that it's okay to have cesium in the environment. I'm just saying that we have been living with radioactivity all along. Our bodies, for example, have, let's say, use an example of potassium, natural potassium, about 140 grams or so. And I looked this up. I have not measured that, but this is an accepted literature value. Our body has about 140 grams of potassium, out of which some of it is radioactive, and it's natural. And that radioactive part gives us an inventory of 5,000 becarals of potassium 40. 40 is radioactive. Yes. So becarals are the unit that we use for radioactivity. That means how many decays we see per second from a certain amount. So our body has this natural radioactivity. So if you add a few atoms of cesium to it, I'm not saying it doesn't do an added effect, but it's... It doesn't help. You see my point. It doesn't help. It doesn't help. But if you add one or two to the 5,000, it's... You don't know what the combination of the cocktail effect is. That's what I was talking about, Martini's. We're going to have one now. It'll be very quick. It'll be a one minute Martini break. We'll be right back. You'll see. We'll be right back. Aloha. I'm Kaui Lucas, host of Hawaii is my mainland here on Think Tech Hawaii every Friday afternoon at 3 p.m. Start your Paul Hanna weekend off with the show where I talk to people about issues pertinent to Hawaii. You can see my previous shows at my blog, kauilukas.com, and also on Think Tech's show. Sorry. Okay, with Ethan Allen on Friday, we talked about the biome. We talked about how bacteria is a working part, a symbiotic part of our life, our life and our bodies, and how our bodies are really the descendants of bacteria in some way many, many, many years ago. But all of this is so special, really. Well, the cells hang together and we get to be human beings and do what we do. But it's more complicated than just a human being sterile and isolated from the environment. We are part of the environment. The environment is part of us. And if we have these radioactive elements in our body, that doesn't really help, because it changes the atomic chemistry. Is that a word you ever heard before? The atomic... Structure? Structure, thank you. Atomic structure of our bodies and therefore, you know, messes up our cells and maybe gives us cancer. What? That's the fear from radioactive. Yes, that it causes disruption in the chemical bonds that then causes genetic mutations, leads to cancers. And I mentioned potassium-40 specifically because it's already in our bodies. It has been there forever. We don't know whether our bodies really... I mean, our bodies are really accustomed to that much... My wife has a store of bananas at all times. Oh, exactly. She says she wants the potassium. Yes. Does the potassium good for you? You have been eating it for a while and if you're fine with it, of course, yes. So back to being serious. So this potassium-40, our body is accustomed to. Yeah. And so there has always been some natural radioactivity in us. There has always been some basic level of disruption in the molecules. And so that's what the radioactive nuclides cause that they cut simply through. And our body has the ability to repair itself. Really? For this kind of damage from radioactivity? Yes. And so if you get a lower dose, if one gets a lower dose, our body is able to remediate that. It's once we get a very high dose. That's when the body can recover and can be a serious acute radiation dose causing immediate effects or then the latent effects that appear many, many years later. And that's the very specifically with Fukushima, for example. Those people that got acute so chronic doses were the workers in the power plant. But the population that was displaced and evacuated, for them it's more the latent effects by consuming the food, breathing the air there and drinking the water that might be tainted with Fukushima derived radio nuclides. And they're not really protecting themselves either. The workers arguably knew there was a risk and they could protect themselves with all those suits and breathing apparatus, whatnot. But the people in the neighborhood, they didn't weren't able to protect themselves. Right. And there were several evacuation levels. And so not all the people were moved out at the same time. Yeah. So now you're out there in the ocean trying to track on these radioactive materials and you're getting water, many leaders at a time and you're putting it through these strainers to strain out cesium. And now you can have, I guess, a concentrated sample of the cesium that's out there. What does this do for you? So specifically... You wear gloves when you do this, right? Yes. Because of other chemicals are involved in that. Specifically for the cesium. Actually, gloves do not protect you against gamma radiation, necessarily. Gamma radiation travels through gloves. And the levels we measure are not that high. Okay. So we don't have to... So you don't worry too much about it. No. I notice you're not glowing in any way. No. Yeah. Like a record reflect. Henrietta is not glowing. Well, I mean, you might be glowing, but it's not that kind of a glow. Thank you. As long as you're having fun. Right. Right. So anyway, so that kind of sampling allowed us to trace the initial direction where the plume that was released from all the cooling ponds and other places within the reactor or just the cooling water that they sprayed on the reactor and then discharged to the ocean. Where did that travel and how fast? So there were models that were produced within a reasonable amount of time after the accident predicting where the radionuclides would travel. And some predicted that would direct hit towards Hawaii and Alaska and the U.S. west coast. And so obviously we were concerned, but no model is perfect. It just depends on what data you feed into it, right? So still wanted to check. And we had a cruise organized in June of 2011 during which we produced a set of data kind of along the line between Japan and Hawaii. And right away there we saw the higher elevations of this cesium near Japan, which then got much lower and apparently didn't even reach the Hawaiian islands. Fortunately, in 2011, so it was steered more towards the north with the Kuroshio current and the north Pacific current. So it would turn left as it got closer to the islands? Yes. Turn north to go into the gyre? Yes. And so there are some models that then predicted that, okay, so we understand it went to the north. Let's see how it will disperse then farther when will Hawaii and the other places and the Pacific see it. And it was one model predicted that we would see the radiation in 2014. So we said, oh, well, doing this transect we cannot stop sampling. So we have been sampling in 2011 and 2012 every month even from Station Aloha and Offshore Station and then the coastlines of Hawaii. That's still in the cosplay station. Exactly. We know him well. Yes, and his team was collecting samples for us. And so we had been monitoring regularly and then realizing that, okay, the plume does not directly hit Hawaii. So we scaled it down. Now we are sampling every six months. And I can tell that up to this date we have not seen Fukushima-derived Season 134 at detectable levels in the near vicinity of Hawaiian islands. How close? Station Aloha is 100 miles. So it's not within 100 miles? It's definitely not within 100 miles. So you have to go out and do this on a systematic basis with time intervals using the same gathering system each time. Yes. And then you go to location and see what's there. And then you make a mark on the chart somehow and say what you found. And then after a while you get to map all these things out and you can track the plume as it goes across the Pacific. So right now we have not had a major, you know, arrival of this Season 134 in Hawaii. So does it mean it bypassed us and we don't have to worry anymore? It went north of us but the ocean still mixes and the decision will disperse. So the cruise that I mentioned was organized in collaboration with the Woods Oceanographic Institution and some other organizations. What do they know about the Pacific? They're on the Atlantic Ocean right there. Oh, they are close collaborators. Not just with us but the other teams in Hawaii. So I wouldn't discount that one. So you're learning more from them or are they learning more from you? It's a collaboration. And I brought this up because it's still a collaboration. Simply one cruise cannot answer all the questions we have. So it's many different crews. It's many different groups putting the data together. And actually I mentioned the Woods Hall group because they have this database that has most of the dots on the map plus because it's not an immediate health risk from the perspective of the government, there's not much money going into the science. They run it as an outreach. And they have funding for that. That's the important thing. They get the funding from the people, the concerned citizens. So if you are interested in how much radioactivity or cesium specifically, Fukushima, the right cesium is in your backyard. You pay some amount of money to them. They send you the sampling clips. You collect the water, you send it to them and they analyze it. So I have been servicing the Hawaiian samples. It's almost like a DNA thing where you send away for a DNA or you send away for how your neighborhood is doing. In terms of cesium, what they're learning for. So this is called the citizen science. It's really funded by concerned citizens. So after the cesium heads north and into the gyre there, which is what, thousands of miles away from the way, a long way, it's going to distribute and disseminate itself all over the world. Just the way Bikini Island did back in the 50s in the early 60s. And at that point, do we care? I mean, how much do we care? I mean, if it was coming directly at us and we were getting it, say, on Waikiki Beach and the newspaper was saying, cesium levels elevated on Waikiki Beach, right? Then that would be a concern to our economy, right? That would be a concern to our economy. These headlines appeared last year in California. That's when the plume arrived. And the levels were below health concern. But that didn't stop the newspapers. That did not stop the newspapers nor the scientists because now we want to understand, okay, what are the levels, how it mixes, how it disperses, how much of that goes to the fish. Yeah, that you eat, right, and gets into the water system somehow, yeah. Yes, so definitely the scientists are following up, even though the activities are low, we still want to know how much and right. Oh, fish. Fish. We have a chart on fish. It just so happens we have a chart on fish. Quezca seca. That's Hungarian. What is it? So this is a study done by a student that worked with me for two years, Hannah Azuz. She was an undergraduate at the Geology and Geophysics Department. She came up to me with an interest, okay, so I know we work with Fukushima, derived radionuclides. I would like to study fish. And since there was no background information on which fish would concentrate cesium the most, we agreed that she just purchased all the kinds of different kinds of fish you can buy in Hawaii. Very scientific. Yes, and so she analyzed these three different kinds of fish that she purchased in the store and looked at how much of the old, the nuclear weapons derived cesium there is in the fish and how much of the new cesium that came from Fukushima that is in the fish. Or you can tell. Yes, we can tell. So the blue is the old nuclear weapons derived. Nuclear weapons, Chernobyl and other sources. And the red is the new Fukushima derived cesium-137. That's the 30-year half-life. That's the one that will linger on for a long time. And the green is cesium-134, the two-year half-life. Definitely coming from Fukushima. You see that some of the fish have none of the new one, none of the Fukushima derived. But about 30% of them do. And for three of them, half of the cesium inventory in the fish is actually the Fukushima derived. And I would like to point out that the scale goes to 0.7 becquerels per kilogram. So becquerel, as I said, is the unit for radioactivity. The food and drug administration sets a limit on how much cesium there could be in a fish so that they would not let you eat it anymore. And that's about 1,000 becquerels per kilogram. So this was 0.7,000 is the limit. Well, we don't have the chart anymore, but I have imprinted on my mind two fish that didn't seem to have any 134 or 137. And that was cod. Cod is safe, at least according to the chart. And yellowfin tuna is safe, too. How do you like that? I would say all these fish are safe if we really compare it to the FDA limit. Because they have 0.7 becquerels per kilogram as opposed to the 1,000, which is the limit. Yes, some people argue that any radioactivity is bad for you, but then let me compare eating this fish to a banana. Eating this fish year-round, even the one that had the highest Fukushima derived radioactivity, eating that fish year-round, assuming you eat about 24 kilograms of it, which is an average U.S. consumption per person, you would get from eating the same fish all year, the same dose as eating one banana. Wait till I tell my wife about this. She's loaded with bananas. And I eat bananas, too. But they have the naturally occurring potassium-40. These fish also have the naturally occurring potassium-40, which is at the levels of 50 compared to the 0.7 of cesium. I'm starting to get the idea that your science in terms of its interest to the public is largely around how this kind of distribution of radioactive material which you're tracking affects our food and our lives. Am I right, or is there something else? It's both. I'm curious scientifically how the currents there have radionuclides dispersed in the ocean. What can we learn about the circulation of the passive ocean? But I guess that's not so interesting for the people that want to hear about how bad it is. That's why I offered to show this picture about the fish, because that's what I know people would care. We should also care about learning everything we can about the Pacific Ocean and seeing the way it moves, because I don't wish it, but maybe other things that we want to track from this. But I can see people would be interested in this, not just because there's 134 or 137, but because there are other antigens out there that may find their way into our lives, our society, our food, our community, and we won't realize it unless somebody is tracking it. I would like to point out that as a scientist, I see my role in producing these results and put them out there. I don't judge. I'm not saying Fukushima is not bad or bad. I'm just putting it out there, and I set the FDA limit as what to compare to. So that's my role, just to produce the results. And I let someone else decide, OK, safe or not safe. And in this case, the DOH, the Department of Health, says the limits are fair. That's fair. I mean, you produce the data. And someone else decides. And someone else decides exactly, you know, what the medical effects are. Very interesting having this discussion with you, Henry. This is really, really important and interesting. So glad you're doing this. You went to school in Prague for your original degree in geology, wasn't it? No, that one was nuclear. Nuclear? Engineering. Nuclear engineering. And then University of Florida in Tallahassee to your PhD in... Florida State University in PhD in chemical oceanography. And then God, in his ultimate wisdom, came down and made you come to Hawaii. Well, I had a stopover at the Woods Hole Oceanographic... Oh, OK. Well, that's why you're defending that. That's a bit of a... But then I, yes, I fortunately ended up here where I enjoy the environment, but not just that. There is so much to study and learn. Yes. Thank you for being here. Thank you for having me. Thank you for coming down to Think Tech. Thank you. Thank you very much.