Just a reminder - half of Japan's seafood comes from coastal fisheries, mariculture and aquaculture

Most of the radionuclides released from the damaged reactors appear to have been dispersed offshore, but there have been no reports of estimates of total activity released or the inventory of isotopes released.

Some have reported that the seawater used to cool the damaged reactors was dumped back into the ocean.

Marine organisms concentrate radionuclides from seawater but the food web dynamics of radionuclides in these systems are complex, and in many respects poorly understood.

Suffice it to say that contaminants washed out to sea from the tsunami and radionuclides entering coastal marine food webs from the damaged reactors will have an impact on Japan's seafood industry.

Japanese rice production is endangered as well.

This radiological disaster poses an existential threat to Japan.

But - as was seen at Chernobyl - wildlife suffered measurable ill-effects from radiation exposure.

Top predators (sharks, seabirds and toothed whales) will suffer the greatest radiological effects from food web concentration of radionuclides.

I like fish as much as the next guy (both ways), but surely you know that seawater is already radioactive?

The best thing in the world that can happen here is for the plume to be blown out to sea and get rained into the ocean.

Japan has a long history of maintaining local rice and other agricultural self-sufficiency - and that is in peril now.

OK?

But the seafood?

You seem to constantly ignore issues of scale. I wouldn't want to eat seafood from the area of the BP spill, but even though I would arrest a guy who dumped a quart of oil into the sea... I wouldn't be concerned about eating fish near that spill.

Seawater is already radioactive. Adding a tenth of a percent (just a guess, but likely very high) to that radioactivity isn't going to add a public health danger... certainly not one that compares to the far greater public health hazards they're dealing with right now.

If you can find one alive, you don't want it.