WASHINGTON — Scientists have found radioactive material from the crippled Fukushima nuclear reactor in tiny sea creatures and ocean water some 600 km off the coast of Japan, revealing the extent of the release and the direction pollutants might take in a future environmental disaster.

Using 24 specially equipped drifting buoys, a team led by researchers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts found radioactive isotopes — slightly different versions of elements — derived from the plant in seawater as well as in various microorganisms and a small sample of fish.

In some places, the WHOI team discovered cesium radiation hundreds to thousands of times higher than would be expected naturally, with ocean eddies and larger currents both guiding the ‘radioactive debris’ and concentrating it.

With these results, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers estimate that it will take at least a year or two for the radioactive material released at Fukushima Daiichi plant to get across the Pacific Ocean.

‘We saw a telephone pole,’ study leader Ken Buesseler, a marine chemist and oceanographer at WHOI, told LiveScience. ‘There were lots of chemical plants. A lot of stuff got washed into the ocean.’

The Fukushima nuclear plant […]