You Might Even Say It Glows: Radioactive Tuna and the Parallels Between Fukushima and the Gulf Spill

Although the twin tragedies are fundamentally different in many ways, there are also some disturbing similarities between the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill and last year's post-earthquake, nuclear meltdown at Fukushima, Japan. Both episodes were rooted in fundamentally unsound solutions to an industrialized nation's quest for easy energy solutions. Both accidents were downplayed for days by officials who sought to cover up the full extent of the danger. And today, both the Gulf of Mexico and the contaminated zone around the Japanese nuclear plant face a long, difficult road to environmental recovery -- even as government and industry try to pretend that the crisis is in the past. Another grim similarity is that both the oil that flowed for days from the crippled rig in the Gulf and the radioactive water that spilled from the containment facilities at Fukushima pose serious threats to the fragile chain of marine life. In recent weeks we've been understandably more focused on the ongoing legacy of the Deepwater Horizon spill, with the two-year anniversary marked by reports of fishermen catching eyeless shrimp or seriously diseased fish -- and that's in the areas that haven't become dead zones for marine life. But health concerns also persist in the waters off Japan. ...