Radioactive material from the Fukushima nuclear disaster has been found in tiny sea creatures and ocean water some 186 miles (300 kilometers) off the coast of Japan, revealing the extent of the release and the direction pollutants might take in a future environmental disaster.

In some places, the researchers from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) 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, detailed Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team estimates it will take at least a year or two for the radioactive material released at Fukushima to get across the Pacific Ocean. And that information is useful when looking at all the other pollutants and debris released as a result of the tsunami that destroyed towns up and down the eastern coast of Japan.

‘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.’

Drifting radiation

The Tohoku earthquake and tsunami of March 11, 2011, led to large […]