A new report reveals that the disaster led to the "greatest single nuclear contamination of the sea ever seen," according to PhysOrg.
Fukushima's aboveground horrors are thankfully unlikely to rival those of Chernobyl--though the disaster was certainly still wrought with unspeakable tragedies. And some of those are in areas less visible to the evening news' camera lens: Throughout the disaster, unprecedented amounts of caesium 137 leaked into the Pacific, causing the worst nuclear pollution at sea in history.
PhysOrg reports:
From March 21 to mid-July, 27.1 peta becquerels of caesium 137 entered the sea, the Institute for Radiological Protection and Nuclear Safety (IRSN) said. One peta becquerel is a million billion bequerels, or 10 to the power of 15. Of the total, 82 percent entered the sea before April 8, through water that was pumped into the Fukushima's damaged reactor units in a bid to cool them down, it said."This is the biggest single outflow of man-made radionuclides to the marine environment ever observed," the gency said in a press release. Caesium is a slow-decaying element, taking 30 years to lose half of its radioactivity.