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News: Japan's farms may avoid fallout legacy
Preliminary results from studies of soil and crops suggest that Japan's farmers may not have to worry about a long-term legacy of radioactive fallout from the Fukushima nuclear disaster.
In an exclusive news story in this week's edition of Nature, Tomoko Nakanishi at the University of Tokyo reveals that most of the radioactive contamination of crops around Fukushima prefecture had settled on the surface of their leaves, and could be washed off. Crops are not absorbing radioisotopes from contaminated soil in significant quantities. “It’s harvest time now and farmers are wondering what to do,” says Nakanishi. “They can throw the current harvest away. But it is OK to plant again.”
The team also found that the radioisotopes seem to be stuck firmly to the soil, mainly in the top five centimetres, and are not being significantly washed away by rain. This may be preventing the radioisotopes from entering groundwater, and suggests that a thin layer of the most contaminated surface soils can be collected and buried or reprocessed, leaving the land safe to work again. Although this may prove to be expensive, scientists contacted by Nature are urging to Japanese government to move quickly to implement a soil disposal plan.
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News: Europe's chemical safety law under fire
Chemical companies have failed to fill key gaps in safety data and clarify the toxic effects of the substances they produce, some four years after Europe’s sweeping chemicals law (REACH) came into force, an analysis suggests.
An exclusive news story in this week's issue of Nature reports on a study of the summaries of 200 data dossiers, prepared by chemical companies to comply with REACH, which report results from toxicity tests on their products.
The analysis was conducted by Costanza Rovida, a consultant chemist based in Varese, Italy, on behalf of the European arm of the Center for Alternatives to Animal
Testing (CAAT) at the University of Konstanz, Germany.
She found that many dossiers rely heavily on old data, fail to suggest new tests, often base their conclusions on comparisons with other chemicals, and almost entirely avoid any mention of non-animal testing methods.
“Industry has not taken full responsibility for the quality of data,” says Jukka Malm,
director of regulatory affairs at REACH’s regulator, the European Chemical Agency (ECHA) in Helsinki, Finland. But Malm says that although the ECHA checks all dossiers that propose new animal tests, it does not have enough resources to check more than 5% of dossiers that do not propose new animal tests – a hands-off approach that some observers believe highlights a potential weakness in REACH.
For background information please contact the press office.
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