I'm not terribly concerned - the reactor at Fukushima is a completely different design than the Russian reactor at Chernobyl. While the Fukukshima plants might emit lethal doses of radiation to their immediate area - radioactive particles and dust will be so dispersed by the time it hits US soil that nothing will come of it. People are still living on Bikini Atol (in fact, it's been kind of a popular fishing destination for at least a decade - big bonefish down that way).
The Russians detonated the largest nuclear device ever - a 50 megaton weapon - and radiation levels here in the US never approached hazardous.
When Chernobyl exploded - not even Alaska saw dangerous levels of radiation.
Not everything exposed to radiation stays radioactive either. It also don't slice though everything like a hot knife - that's why concrete, steel, and lead are used when building shelters against radiation, or constructing containment vessels. Yes, radiation will zip right through most organic matter, and yes with enough exposure, it hangs around - but the damage done usually isn't from it sticking around, so much as it causing damage to your cells as it passes through you or enters you. Damaged cells then produce damaged cells - and thus - cancer happens. Cancer is what kills most people exposed to radiation - not the radiation itself. That's why certain types of radiation are used to fight cancer - it kills the cancer cells and prevents them from reproducing.
The type of radioactivity we would see in the US is not the same radiation that is potentially a killer overseas - we're going to see more radioactive dust - which is actually pretty easy to decontaminate - as far as NBC stuff goes.
The ocean is, as said before, remarkably better at handling messes than we think. Mother nature has been dealing with disasters for a looooong time - without man kind's help. There are natural oil vents all over the world - yet we don't see tar balls washing up everywhere, or deformed fishies everywhere. Yes, occasionally something really bad happens that causes problems. Happens naturally, or - in more recent geological terms - man kind steps on our collective johnson and mother nature still takes care of things.
The greenie weenie hug-a-tree hippies that want everyone shoved into electric wind and solar powered cars and busses don't bother to study natural earth cycles - and they blame climate change on mankind. That's a lot of bunk right there - the earth goes through heating and cooling cycles naturally. Man kind didn't cause the ice ages, and man kind didn't cause global warming that melted the ice and gave us our lakes and rivers of today. To think that man kind will play a major part in the earth's overall climate is being very hubristic as a species - we're just not that danged important in mother nature's eyes. That's not to say we haven't done ecological damage - no, we have really ****ed some things up. But they all get taken care of in time - with or without man kind's help.
Mother nature will take care of any radioactive material that finds it's way into her oceans. It's not going to cause every fish that swims to spout three eyes, a spare tail, or grow legs and turn into godzilla. We'll be fine.
If you want to look at relatively short term effects - look at the economic effects of this disaster - they will be a lot more prevalent than any problems from radiation anyone outside of Japan will face. I'll bet you that the price of the hippie's much loved Prius jumps by the end of the year.
