More leaks found at crippled Japan nuclear plant

By MARI YAMAGUCHI
Associated Press
Published: Friday, Feb. 3, 2012 — 6:42 am
Last Modified: Friday, Feb. 3, 2012 — 7:28 am

TOKYO — Leaks of radioactive water have become more frequent at Japan’s crippled nuclear power plant less than two months after it was declared basically stable.

The problem underlines the continuing challenges facing Tokyo Electric Power Co. as it attempts to keep the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant under control. A massive earthquake and tsunami badly damaged the plant last March, resulting in the melting of three reactor cores.

Workers spotted a leak Friday at a water reprocessing unit which released enough beta rays to cause radiation sickness, TEPCO spokesman Junichi Matsumoto said. He said no one was injured and the leak stopped after bolts were tightened on a tank.

Matsumoto said TEPCO also found that 8.5 tons of radioactive water had leaked earlier in the week after a pipe became detached at Unit 4, one of the plant’s six reactors. The company earlier had estimated that only a few gallons (liters) had leaked.

He said officials are investigating the cause of that leak, but that it was unlikely the pipe had been loosened by the many aftershocks that have hit the plant.

The structural integrity of the damaged Unit 4 reactor building has long been a major concern among experts because a collapse of its spent fuel cooling pool could cause a disaster worse than the three reactor meltdowns.

Cold winter weather has also caused water inside pipes to freeze elsewhere at the plant, resulting in leaks in at least 30 locations since late January, Matsumoto said.

Officials have not detected any signs of radioactive water from the leaks reaching the surrounding ocean. Sandbag walls have been built around problem areas as a precaution.

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Fukushima farmers furious over lack of consideration in decontamination subsidies

February 2, 2012
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The Fukushima Municipal Government has worked out a specific plan to decontaminate all local farmland between this month and March next year in order to ensure the safety of agricultural products and prevent residents’ external exposure to radiation. Shipments of rice grown in some areas of the city have been prohibited because radioactive cesium in excess of the provisional limit set by the national government has been detected.

However, the municipal government has deemed it difficult to replace thick layers of surface soil with subsoil or to plow large portions of farmland according to the guidelines, because most local farmland is divided into small plots and large machinery cannot enter such land. For the time being, the municipal government has decided to plow a layer of surface soil about 12 centimeters deep, using agricultural machinery that local farmers possess.

The national government has offered to extend subsidies to cover the costs of buying zeolite used to absorb radioactive substances only if the surface soil is replaced and plowed in accordance with the Environment Ministry guidelines.

The Fukushima Municipal Government is poised to demand that the central government subsidies cover the purchase of zeolite even if the requirements are not met, on the grounds that spraying zeolite over farmland can help reduce the contamination of agricultural products through radioactive cesium.

However, bureaucratic red tape has posed a stumbling block to such subsidies.

The Environment Ministry, which is aiming primarily to reduce airborne radiation, insists that reducing agricultural products’ radiation levels is beyond its jurisdiction.

“Decontamination is aimed at preventing ordinary people’s external exposure to radiation. We’re aware of the need to prevent agricultural products from being contaminated with radiation, but it’s outside our jurisdiction,” a ministry official said.

The Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Ministry says it is experimenting with various decontamination methods, including those to be employed in small areas of farmland where large machinery cannot be used. If some of these methods prove effective, the ministry will urge the Environment Ministry to incorporate them in its guidelines.

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No big Fukushima health impact seen: U.N. body chairman

VIENNA | Tue Jan 31, 2012 2:15pm EST

(Reuters) — The health impact of last year’s Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan appears relatively small thanks partly to prompt evacuations, the chairman of a U.N. scientific body investigating the effects of radiation said on Tuesday.

The fact that some radioactive releases spread over the ocean instead of populated areas also contributed to limiting the consequences, said Wolfgang Weiss of the U.N. Scientific Committee on the effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR).

“As far as the doses we have seen from the screening of the population ... they are very low,” Weiss told Reuters. This was partly “due to the rapid evacuation and this worked very well.”

Weiss was speaking on the sidelines of a week-long meeting of 60 international experts in Vienna to assess for the United Nations the radiation exposures and health effects of the world’s worst nuclear accident in 25 years.

The March 11 disaster caused by a 9.0 magnitude earthquake and tsunami wrecked the Fukushima plant on the coast north of Tokyo, triggering a radiation crisis and widespread contamination. About 80,000 residents fled a 20-km (12-mile) exclusion zone.

Weiss said Japanese experts attending the meeting had told him that they were not aware of any acute health effects, in contrast to the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine.

“What we have seen in Chernobyl — people were dying from huge, high exposures, some of the workers were dying very soon — nothing along these lines has been reported so far (in Japan),” he said. “Up to now there were no acute immediate effects observed.”

Several thousand children developed thyroid cancer due to radiation exposure after the Chernobyl disaster in the then Soviet Union, when a reactor exploded and caught fire and radiation was sent billowing across Europe.

Weiss said a few workers at Fukushima had received high radioactive doses, but “so far the initial medical follow-up of these workers who had high doses, as far as the Japanese colleagues told us, was OK.”

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Asked whether he was optimistic that the overall health effects would be quite small, Weiss said: “If we find out that what we know now is representing the situation, then the answer would be yes ... the health impact would be low.”

What happens if we find out that we “we know” is NOT “representing the situation”?

The Irish Times — Friday, January 27, 2012
Report urging mass evacuation of Tokyo residents kept secret

DAVID McNEILL in Tokyo

JAPAN’S GOVERNMENT feared millions of Tokyo residents might have to be evacuated during the worst of last year’s nuclear crisis, but kept the scenario secret to avoid panic in some of the world’s most crowded urban areas, according to an internal report.

The 15-page report, by the Japan Atomic Energy Commission, was delivered to then prime minister Naoto Kan two weeks after the March 11th earthquake and tsunami triggered the crisis as the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.

It warned that if the situation at the plant spiralled out of control, compulsory or voluntary evacuation orders would have to be issued to residents living within 250km (155 miles), a radius that would have included the metropolitan Tokyo area, home to about 30 million people.

The directive would have also covered several large cities north and west of the plant, including Sendai, which has roughly the same population as Dublin. Some of the areas would be contaminated for “several decades” warned the report, which has been seen by AP news agency.

Last May, operator Tokyo Electric Power Co (Tepco) admitted that uranium fuel inside three of the plant’s reactors had melted down in the first few days after March 11th. A series of hydrogen explosions had showered thousands of square kilometres of land and sea with radioactive substances, but government and Tepco officials repeatedly denied the meltdown scenario.

Over 80,000 people were subsequently told to leave the most heavily irradiated areas around the nuclear plant and have yet to return. Tens of thousands more have since left Fukushima prefecture voluntarily.

Mr Kan and his government insisted throughout March and April that the nuclear crisis was being contained and ignored calls to widen the evacuation area, saying there was no need.

After he left office, the prime minister admitted in an interview with a Tokyo newspaper last autumn that he feared the Fukushima disaster would leave the capital uninhabitable, and that evacuating it would have been “impossible”. He said that the “spine-chilling thought” of a deserted capital convinced him to scrap nuclear power.

The latest revelations will revive criticism that the authorities have been less than forthcoming since the crisis erupted, and add to suspicions that they are still downplaying the impact of radiation. Government officials recently admitted that data on where the radiation went was withheld from the Japanese public for 10 days, but given to the US military in Japan.

The report will also add to concerns that Japan is unprepared for a similar disaster. Last week researchers at the University of Tokyo warned that there was a 75 per cent probability that the capital would be hit by a major earthquake in the next four years.
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After Fukushima, fish tales

Montreal Gazette
By Alex Roslin, The Gazette January 14, 2012

After the world’s WORST nuclear accident in 25 years, authorities in Canada said people living here were safe and faced no health risks from the fallout from Fukushima.

They said most of the radiation from the crippled Japanese nuclear power plant would fall into the ocean, where it would be diluted and not pose any danger.

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Dewar, the executive director of Physicians for Global Survival, a Canadian anti-nuclear group, says the Canadian government has downplayed the radiation risks from Fukushima and is doing little to monitor them.

“We suspect we’re going to see more cancers, decreased fetal viability, decreased fertility, increased metabolic defects — and we expect them to be generational,” she said.

And evidence has emerged that the impacts of the disaster on the Pacific Ocean are worse than expected.

Since a tsunami and earthquake destroyed the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant last March, radioactive cesium has consistently been found in 60 to 80 per cent of Japanese fishing catches each month tested by Japan’s Fisheries Agency.

In November, 65 per cent of the catches tested positive for cesium (a radioactive material created by nuclear reactors), according to a Gazette analysis of data on the fisheries agency’s website. Cesium is a long-lived radionuclide that persists in the environment and increases the risk of cancer, according to the United States Environmental Protection Agency, which says the most common form of radioactive cesium has a half-life of 30 years.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency, which monitors food safety, says it is aware of the numbers but says the amounts of cesium detected are small.

“Approximately 60 per cent of fish have shown to have detectable levels of radionuclides,” it said in an emailed statement.

“The majority of exported fish to Canada are caught much farther from the coast of Japan, and the Japanese testing has shown that these fish have not been contaminated with high levels of radionuclides.”

But the Japanese data shows elevated levels of contamination in several seafood species that Japan has exported to Canada in recent years.

In November, 18 per cent of cod exceeded a new radiation ceiling for food to be implemented in Japan in April — along with 21 per cent of eel, 22 per cent of sole and 33 per cent of seaweed.

Overall, one in five of the 1,100 catches tested in November exceeded the new ceiling of 100 becquerels per kilogram. (Canada’s ceiling for radiation in food is much higher: 1,000 becquerels per kilo.)

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Fisher is researching how radiation from Fukushima is affecting the Pacific fishery. “There has been virtually zero monitoring and research on this,” he said, calling on other governments to do more radiation tests on the ocean’s marine life.

“Is it something we need to be terrified of ? No. Is it something we need to monitor? Yes, particularly in coastal waters where concentrations are high.”

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In October, a U.S. study — coauthored by oceanographer Ken Buesseler, a senior scientist at the non-profit Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Woods Hole, Mass., — reported Fukushima caused history’s biggest-ever release of radiation into the ocean — 10 to 100 times more than the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe.

“It’s completely untrue to say this level of radiation is safe or harmless,” said Gordon Edwards, president of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility.
...

“The reassurances have been completely irresponsible. To say there are no health concerns flies in the face of all scientific evidence,” said Edwards, who has advised the federal auditor-general’s office and Ontario government on nuclear-power issues.

Other Fukushima impacts have been unexpected, too. The first debris swept into the sea by the tsunami reportedly started to wash ashore on the west coast in mid-December, a year earlier than scientists and authorities predicted.

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The Gazette analyzed the Japanese fisheries data for 22 seafood species that Japan has exported to Canada in recent years.

Some cesium was found in 16 of these 22 species in November, the last full month for which data was available.

Cesium was especially prevalent in certain of the species:

- 73 per cent of mackerel tested

- 91 per cent of the halibut

- 92 per cent of the sardines

- 93 per cent of the tuna and eel

- 94 per cent of the cod and anchovies

- 100 per cent of the carp, sea-weed, shark and monkfish

Some of the fish were caught in Japanese coastal waters. Other catches were made hundreds of kilometres away in the open ocean.

There, the fish can also be caught by fishers from dozens of other nations that ply the waters of the Pacific.

Yet, Japan is the only country that appears to be systematically testing fish for radiation and publicly reporting the results.

CFIA is no longer doing any testing of its own. It did some radiation tests on food imports from areas of Japan around the stricken nuclear plant in the weeks after the Fukushima accident.

Only one of the 169 tested products showed any radiation. CFIA stopped doing the tests last June, saying they weren’t needed.

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CFIA now relies on Japanese authorities to screen Japanese food exported to Canada.

But Japan’s monitoring of food has come under a storm of criticism from the Japanese public after food contaminated with radiation was sold to consumers.

...

But despite this belief and the importance of the Pacific fishery, few studies exist on how Fukushima affected marine life.

One of those studies found that fish and crustaceans caught in the vicinity of Fukushima in late March had 10,000 times more than socalled safe levels of radiation. The study, published last May in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, also said macroalgae had 19,000 times the safe level.

Those levels were measured before the Japanese utility that runs the crippled nuclear plant dumped 11,000 tonnes of radioactive water into the Pacific in April and additional leaks that have released hundreds of tonnes more.

But since that early study, little research has been published on the topic.

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He co-authored the study in October that said cesium levels in the Pacific had gone up an astonishing 45 million times above pre-accident levels. The levels then declined rapidly for a while, but after that, they unexpectedly levelled off.

In July, cesium levels stopped declining and remained stuck at 10,000 times above pre-accident levels.

It meant the ocean wasn’t diluting the radiation as expected. If it had been, cesium levels would have kept falling. The finding suggested radiation was still being released into the ocean long after the accident in March, Buesseler said in an interview.

“It implies the groundwater is contaminated or the facility is still leaking radiation.”

The Japanese fisheries data seems to support this conclusion. Far from declining, contamination levels in some species were flat or even rose last fall, including species that Japan exports to Canada like skipjack tuna, cod, sole and eel.

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Continuing radiation leaks from Fukushima could be to blame, he said. Another culprit, he said, may be a phenomenon called bio-magnification — the tendency for radiation concentrations to increase in species that are farther up the food chain.

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See no evil, hear no evil, radiate no evil.

Japan may announce Fukushima cold shutdown on Dec. 16: Yomiuri

TOKYO | Thu Dec 1, 2011 8:26pm EST

(Reuters) — Japan may announce on December 16 that tsunami-damaged nuclear reactors in Fukushima are in a cold shutdown, the Yomiuri newspaper reported on Friday, an important milestone in its plan to bring under control the worst nuclear accident in 25 years.

The Fukushima Daiichi plant, 240 km (150 miles) northeast of Tokyo, was wrecked by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, which knocked out reactor cooling systems, causing meltdowns of nuclear fuel rods.

A cold shutdown is when water used to cool nuclear fuel rods remains below its boiling point, preventing the fuel from reheating.

Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda may declare a cold shutdown because a November 30 analysis by plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co showed that temperatures for the nuclear fuel lying at the bottom of the containment vessel have stabilized, the paper said.

Radiation levels at the reactors have also fallen significantly, it said.

Declaring a cold shutdown will have repercussions well beyond the plant as it is one of the criteria the government has said must be met before it begins allowing 80,000 residents evacuated from within a 20 km (12 mile) radius of the plant to return home.

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You have to wonder how soon residents are going to return to the quarantined region now that it’s technically allowable.

Another huge advantage of getting to the “cold-shutdown” status is that Tepco no longer has to keep pumping water into buildings. This issue was highlighted last week with another announcement. It was good news, in a bad sort of way:

Fukushima nuclear plant scraps plan to dump water into sea
The decision comes after the utility released more than 10,000 tons of water tainted with low levels of radiation in April.
By ReutersThu, Dec 08 2011 at 10:20 PM EST

TOKYO — Japan’s crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant said Friday it has scrapped a plan to dump water it treated for radiation contamination into the sea following fierce protests from fishing groups.

That caused an uproar among Japanese fishing cooperatives.

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Tepco estimates that the amount of treated water requiring storage is increasing by 200 to 500 tons every day. It says the plant is likely to reach its storage capacity of about 155,000 tons around March.

The utility released more than 10,000 tons of water tainted with low levels of radiation in April to free up space for water with much higher levels of radioactivity, drawing sharp criticism from neighbors such as South Korea and China.

Yes, achieving cold shutdown is indeed a hugely important achievement:

IAEA welcomes Japan’s announcement of cold shutdown at Fukushima plant
(Mainichi Japan) December 17, 2011

VIENNA (Kyodo) — The International Atomic Energy Agency on Friday welcomed the Japanese government’s announcement that the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant has achieved a stable state of cold shutdown.

Tokyo Electric Power Co., the plant’s operator, and the Japanese government have “made significant progress,” IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano said in a statement.

Amano also said the IAEA will continue monitoring the status of the plant and radiation data in the wake of the nuclear disaster.

“The agency continues to stand ready to provide necessary assistance to Japan as requested,” he said.

(Mainichi Japan) December 17, 2011

Well that has to have the IAEA breathing a sigh of relief.

In other tangentially related news...

’Absolutely no progress being made’ at Fukushima nuke plant, undercover reporter says

TEPCO: Radioactive substances belong to landowners, not us
November 24, 2011

By TOMOHIRO IWATA / Asahi Shimbun Weekly AERA

During court proceedings concerning a radioactive golf course, Tokyo Electric Power Co. stunned lawyers by saying the utility was not responsible for decontamination because it no longer “owned” the radioactive substances.

“Radioactive materials (such as cesium) that scattered and fell from the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant belong to individual landowners there, not TEPCO,” the utility said.

That argument did not sit well with the companies that own and operate the Sunfield Nihonmatsu Golf Club, just 45 kilometers west of the stricken TEPCO plant in Fukushima Prefecture.

The Tokyo District Court also rejected that idea.

But in a ruling described as inconsistent by lawyers, the court essentially freed TEPCO from responsibility for decontamination work, saying the cleanup efforts should be done by the central and local governments.

Although the legal battle has moved to a higher court, observers said that if the district court’s decision stands and becomes a precedent, local governments’ coffers could be drained.

The two golf companies in August filed for a provisional disposition with the Tokyo District Court, demanding TEPCO decontaminate the golf course and pay about 87 million yen ($1.13 million) for the upkeep costs over six months.

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The golf course company commissioned a radiation testing agency to check the course on Nov. 13. It detected 235,000 becquerels of cesium per kilogram of grass, a level that would put the area into a no-entry zone under safety standards enforced after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.

On Nov. 17, radioactive strontium at 98 becquerels per kilogram was detected in the grass and ground.

Asked about TEPCO’s doubts concerning the city’s radiation measurements, Nihonmatsu Mayor Keiichi Miho said, “We made the utmost efforts when we conducted the checks.”

A TEPCO official told The Asahi Shimbun that company will refrain from commenting on the legal battle.

The assessment came after temperatures in the three damaged reactor cores all recently fell below 100 degrees Celsius, stopping radioactive steam from being emitted into the atmosphere.

“Stopping the steam leakage is a major step forward in terms of radiation control,” said Tadashi Narabayashi, professor of reactor engineering at Hokkaido University.
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”

one step back:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011–11-01/tepco-says-nuclear-fission-possible-at-fukushima-plant-2-.html

“
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Tokyo Electric Power Co. detected signs of nuclear fission at its crippled Fukushima atomic power plant, raising the risk of increased radiation emissions. No increase in radiation was found at the site and the situation is under control, officials said.

The company, known as Tepco, began spraying boric acid on the No. 2 reactor at 2:48 a.m. Japan time to prevent accidental chain reactions. Tepco said it may have found xenon, which is associated with nuclear fission, while examining gases taken from the reactor, according to an e-mailed statement today.
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”

and one very ill advised drink of water: http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/01/japanese-official-drinks-water-from-fukushima-reactor-buildings/

“
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As Asahi Shimbun explained, that skeptical mood was obvious last month when a journalist dared Mr. Sonoda to drink some of the water.

At an Oct. 10 news conference hosted by Tepco, a freelance writer said: “Because we are prohibited from entering the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant grounds, we have to trust the information provided by Tepco. If the water is really safe enough to drink, can you provide the water in glasses and have everyone drink it?”

Three days later, a muckraking journalist named Yu Terasawa pointed out to Mr. Sonoda that, in 1996, when the public was concerned that radish sprouts might be contaminated with E. coli bacteria, the Japanese health minister at the time ate some to demonstrate his faith in the food’s safety. “Since Tepco officials said the water is safe enough to drink,” the journalist asked, “why don’t you drink a cup? Will you drink it?”

On Monday, after gulping down half a glass of the water, Mr. Sonoda said: “Just because I drank the water does not mean that its safety has been confirmed, so there is no significance to the act. I drank it because a request had been made.”
...
”

There’s also a new estimate of the clean up time: 3 years before radioactive waste disposal facilities will be online and 30 years for a complete cleanup.

Fukushima Plant Released Record Amount of Radiation Into Sea
Bloomberg
October 31, 2011, 5:10 AM EDT

Oct. 31 (Bloomberg) — The destroyed Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan was responsible for the biggest discharge of radioactive material into the ocean in history, a study from a French nuclear safety institute said.

The radioactive cesium that flowed into the sea from the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant was 20 times the amount estimated by its owner, Tokyo Electric Power Co., according to the study by the Institute for Radiological Protection and Nuclear Safety, which is funded by the French government.

It’s the second report released in a week calling into question estimates from Japan’s government and the operator of the plant that was damaged in the March earthquake and tsunami. The Fukushima station may have emitted more than double the company’s estimate of atmospheric release at the height of the worst civil atomic crisis since Chernobyl in 1986, according to a study in the Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics journal.

he oceanic study estimates 27,000 terabecquerels of radioactive cesium 137 leaked into the sea from the Fukushima plant, north of Tokyo.

Tepco is aware of the estimate from the institute through media reports and has no comment, spokesman Hajime Motojuku said today by phone.
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Fukushima nuclear plant could take 30 years to clean up
Removal of fuel rods and decommissioning of reactors could take decades, warns Japan’s atomic commission
Justin McCurry in Tokyo and agencies
guardian.co.uk, Monday 31 October 2011 04.14 EDT

Experts in Japan have warned it could take more than 30 years to clean up the Fukushima Daiichi power plant.

A panel set up by the country’s nuclear energy commission said the severity of the accident meant it would take decades to remove melted fuel rods and decommission the plant, located 150 miles north of Tokyo.

The commission called on the facility’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco), to begin removing the fuel rods within 10 years. The damage to Fukushima is more difficult to repair than that sustained at Three Mile Island, where fuel removal began six years after an accident in 1979.

Work to decommission four of Fukushima’s six reactors could start this year if Tepco brings the plant to a safe state known as cold shutdown.

The utility will begin by removing spent fuel from storage pools within three years of making the reactors safe, before beginning the more difficult task of removing melted fuel from the three reactors that suffered meltdown.

While radiation emissions have dropped significantly since the 11 March earthquake and tsunami, workers continue to operate in highly dangerous conditions.

Towns near Fukushima have responded cautiously to plans to build temporary storage sites for massive quantities of radioactive debris generated by the accident.

Almost eight months after the start of the crisis the government says the facilities will not be ready for at least another three years. In the meantime, towns will have to store the contaminated waste locally, despite health concerns.
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Much of the early decontamination work has been performed by local authorities and volunteers, although neither has found a satisfactory means of storing the waste. The central government is not expected to take control of the cleanup operation until a decontamination law is passed in January.
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Gulf Shrimp Are Scarce This Season; Answers, Too
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON
Published: October 10, 2011

LAFITTE, La. — The dock at Bundy’s Seafood is quiet, the trucks are empty and a crew a fraction of the normal size sits around a table waiting for something to do. But the most telling indicator that something is wrong is the smell. It smells perfectly fine.

“There’s no shrimp,” explained Grant Bundy, 38. The dock should smell like a place where 10,000 pounds of shrimp a day are bought off the boats. Not this year. In all of September, Bundy’s Seafood bought around 41,000 pounds.

White shrimp season began in late August, and two months in, the shrimpers here say it is a bad one, if not the worst in memory. It is bad not just in spots but all over southeastern Louisiana, said Jules Nunez, 78, calling it the worst season he had seen since he began shrimping in 1950. Some fishermen said their catches were off by 80 percent or more.

“A lot of people say it’s this, it’s that, it’s too hot, it’s too cold, it’s BP,” Mr. Nunez said. “We just don’t know.”

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Those who work in the gulf seafood industry, as well as their lawyers, have watched closely for signs of a species collapse similar to the one that decimated the herring fishery four years after the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska. The causes of even that collapse remain a matter of dispute, but it is often cited as an example of the delayed disaster that shrimpers and others fear.

This concern was stoked further by a recent study by L.S.U. researchers that reported that a species of fish abundant in Gulf marshes was showing signs of cellular damage, problems typically due to exposure to oil. The functions of the fish, a minnow called the killifish, have been affected in ways that could harm reproduction, the study found.

Seafood industry representatives say there is enough uncertainty to raise doubts that the shrimp harvest will recover by 2012, a supposition in a report that Kenneth R. Feinberg, the administrator of the $20 billion compensation fund for victims of the spill, used in his formula for determining final settlements.

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Concerns about the lack of shrimp are different from concerns about the state of shrimp that are found. Repeated studies have shown gulf seafood is safe to eat, a fact trumpeted by industry representatives and government officials, who launched a gulf seafood safety Web site last week to reassure consumers.