Radiation suddenly contaminates the land your family has farmed and lived on for generations. Can soil play a role in protecting crops and human health Research in Fukushima, Japan may lend an answer. On March 11, 2011, a magnitude 9.0 earthquake and tsunami1 caused wide spread destruction in Japan. This included the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. The plants nuclear meltdown released a large amount of radioactivity into the environment. The Japanese government evacuated2 over 100,000 people in the 30 km zone around the plant.Lead researcher Atsushi Nakaos study is the first to investigate the soils physical and chemical properties in rice fields around the Fukushima site. The study, published in the Journal of Environmental Quality, examined factors affecting soil-to-plant transfer of radioactive cesium in the Fukushima area.Radiocesium dissolves easily in water, allowing it to spread quickly. However, different soils have the ability to retain various toxins4 and prevent them from spreading or entering the food chain. The authors measured the ability of a large number of soil samples collected from Fukushima to intercept5 radiocesium. They found success depends on various factors.One key factor is the presence of rough or weathered edges of certain minerals, such as mica3, in the soil. These rough edges catch the radiocesium and prevent its movement. This is the frayed6 edge site concentration. Nakao explains, however, that quantification of the FES with a simple experiment has proven difficult. A surrogate measurement used by soil scientists is the radiocesium interception7 potential . This measurement is time-consuming and requires specialized8 facilities, preventing its measure at local institutes.Thus, Nakaos study looked for and found that other, more easily measured soil properties to predict the radiocesium interception potential of a soil. These findings may be useful in screening soils that are particularly vulnerable to transferring radiocesium to plants grown in them, Nakao says. However, the amounts of radiocesium transferred to plants are normally negligible, because most of the radiocesium is strongly fixed9 on the frayed edge site.
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1 tsunami n.海啸 参考例句： Powerful quake sparks tsunami warning in Japan.大地震触发了日本的海啸预警。 Coastlines all around the Indian Ocean inundated by a huge tsunami.大海啸把印度洋沿岸区域都淹没了。
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