Has anyone done tests to see how the radioactive water and other contaminants have affected the pacific as a whole? how about the fish stock near japan?
However what actually happened was a huge disaster. So right off the coast lets say around 100K cars were destroyed, and the average car has a twenty gallons of liq petrochems like gasoline, used motor oil, and all the various hydraulic and coolant fluids... all floating in coastal water now.
Its like a live retro experiment of what if junkyards and the like were totally unregulated for awhile. There was a time when you'd just dump that stuff in a river instead of proper disposal and recycling, and we've got an interesting live example of what happens if we try it again...
So is the two headed fish because of modest radio contamination, or because it grew up next to a puddle of used motor oil, or the warehouse full of insecticide that washed into the ocean, or...
There have, however, been limited studies about bioaccumulation of tritium in phytoplankton and how it can move up the food chain [1]. As another poster said, tritium decays by beta radiation which isn't necessarily harmful but if it accumulates in the food chain, it might be dangerous (just like heavy metals and fish, for example). Tritium's half life is about 12 years so its not inconceivable.
It's a different environment but you can probably draw some conclusions about the impact/spread of radioactive particles by looking at Chernobyl.
The general flavor of the report is that the pacific as a whole is in no danger. Despite the toxicity of what's been released, the pacific is very, very, big. They expressed concern for local waters near the plant, but weren't able to study that as freely due to Tepco and the Japanese government. Accumulation of isotopes in predator species is still a very real concern.
The issues are so-called hot-spots which cause certain fish to be extremely radioactive and streams causing concentrations of radioactive materials highly contaminating only certain regions and fish.
That being said, there are so many pollutants in the oceans that I'm confused why people are not more outraged about ocean pollution.
Vice Documentary about garbage streams. e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D41rO7mL6zM
Finally, its certainly not acceptable to have on-going ocean pollution, which is probably happening in Fukushima Daiichi.
Chernobyl was bad, but most of the fallout landed on forests and lakes that are not significant source of human food chain (mushrooms, fish in lake and animals in the forest still have traces left).
Fukushima did not blow stuff into the atmosphere, most of the leak is from water leaking to the soil and to the sea. Almost everything living in the sea is important part of the human food chain.
Well, that is actually not right. During the accident radioactive water vapor and other gases were released into the atmosphere due to the explosions. Its correct though that, most of it was washed out by rain quickly being diminished into the ground water or carried away onto the ocean.
More importantly a significant portion of the radioactive water seeped into the groundwater, which will have unknown effects in the future.