Despite ongoing concerns, seafood from the Pacific Ocean may not be contaminated after Japan's 2011 nuclear disaster in Fukushima. New research from Oregon State University asserts tuna caught off the Oregon shore pose very little, if any, health risk.

"You can't say there is absolutely zero risk because any radiation is assumed to carry at least some small risk," Delvan Neville, a graduate research assistant in the university's Department of Nuclear Engineering and Radiation Health Physics, said in a news release. "But these trace levels are too small to be a realistic concern."

The Fukushima Daiichi power station was destroyed after a 7.1-magnitude earthquake struck the island nation's Fukushima Hamadori region on April 11, 2011. Tuna caught in the area showed elevated levels of radioactivity, although the increase had been and continues to be minute, according to a newly published study in the journal Environmental Science and Technology.

Neville, the study's lead author, explained a person would have to consume more than 700,000 pounds of the fish with the highest radioactive level, just to match the amount of radiation an average person is exposed to annually through cosmic rays, the air, the ground, X-rays and other sources.

"A year of eating albacore with these cesium traces is about the same dose of radiation as you get from spending 23 seconds in a stuffy basement from radon gas, or sleeping next to your spouse for 40 nights from the natural potassium-40 in their body," he added. "It's just not much at all."

In its study, the research team led by Neville examined a total of 26 Pacific albacore caught off the coast between 2008 and 2012, in order to provide a comparison between pre-Fuskushima and post-Fukushima radiation levels.

The team confirmed levels of specific radioactive isotopes increased --- but even at the most extreme level, they only measured 0.1 percent of the radiocesium level set by the United States Food and Drug Administration for concern and intervention.

The researchers tested samples from albacore loins, carcasses and guts and found varying, barely detectable levels of radiation.

"The loins, or muscle, is what people eat and the bioaccumulation was about the same there as in the carcass," said study co-author Jason Phillips, a research associate in OSU's College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences.

The researchers also analyzed radion levels in different-aged fish and discovered they were somewhat higher in 4-year-old albacore than in the younger fish, suggesting 3-year-old albacore may have only made one trans-Pacific migration, whereas the 4-year-old fish may have swum through the Fukushima radiation plume twice.

A majority of the 3-year-old fish examined, however, had no traces of Fukushima contamination at all.