Starfish dying in the NW Pacific

[Yo_Mama]

98. It's also technically impossible to rule out alien attacks on our starfish.

There really is a point to the old "It's impossible to prove a negative" adage. Scientifically, that is.

If radiation were a factor, then we would be picking up the radiation in other lifeforms from the ocean in the west coast - and we aren't:
http://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2014/01/08/no-danger-in-eating-pacific-ocean-fish-despite-fukushima-disaster-usc-professor-says/

And believe it or not, yes, the US government has been checking and still checks. Here's an oldie but still relevant news release from the FDA:
http://www.fda.gov/downloads/Food/RecallsOutbreaksEmergencies/Emergencies/UCM253896.pdf

Here's a recent (this January) Scientific American article:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-to-worry-about-after-fukushima-nuclear-disaster/

When it comes to radiation, the nuclear weapons testing conducted from the 1940s to the 1980s contributed orders of magnitude more radioactivity to the oceans than Fukushima (even when combined with Chernobyl, a much larger nuclear catastrophe). There is also an estimated 37 x 10^18 becquerels worth of radioactivity in the oceans from naturally dissolved uranium in seawater anyway, which some view as a future nuclear fuel source but is not generally considered a health risk. (A becquerel measures the rate of radiation emission.) And there are other naturally occurring radioactive elements in seawater as well, such as polonium.
...
Marine scientists have calculated that, based on all the radioactive particles released (or leaking) from Fukushima, a dose due to this most recent nuclear accident would add up to a total of roughly one microsievert (a unit of radiation exposure) of extra radiation—roughly one tenth the average daily dose most Americans experience, one fortieth the amount from a cross–North America flight and one one-hundredth the exposure from a dental x-ray.

Here's the thing - scientists and the already-extant nuclear monitoring programs in the US and other countries were checking on all this at the time of the accident and have been since. The reason there is no scientific concern over this is because in this case, they have proved the negative in so far as breaking the potential causal chain. You would have to be able to detect higher radiation levels in these waters before radiation could be a factor.

Close to Japan some of the fish are contaminated, most specifically those that live in the near-coastal waters, rivers and lakes near Fukushima and slightly north. As the run-off from land contamination washing into the waterways filters down into the sediments in these waters, contamination in some of these species could continue to rise for a few years yet. But that is thousands of miles from these dying starfish.