12 miles of dead squid wash ashore (Santa Cruz Cty CA)

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5. Not radioactivity, all of the others are possible culprits.

"But now that the first unlikely items have reached us, we're also beginning to worry: Will the debris be radioactive? Will human remains turn up? Will mountains of scrap cover our beaches? One blogger callously suggested the Japanese government should pay for the cleanup.

Such reactions reveal a torrent of misconception.

First, there is no giant carpet of items making its way across the ocean. Immediately after the disaster, there were large rafts of debris — roofs and lumber and upturned boats clustered together — but these rapidly broke up. Just five weeks after the tsunami, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration monitors reported that debris fields could no longer be detected by satellite.

The debris is now dispersed across an area more than 4,500 miles long, and, according to Jan Hafner of the International Pacific Research Center at the University of Hawaii, it's "very sparse, very patchy."

Experts also say the debris is not likely to be radioactive. Most of the material entered the sea days before the Fukushima reactor started leaking radioactive water. A 20-foot-long Japanese boat discovered floating north of Midway Atoll last fall contained no traces of radiation. As for human remains coming ashore? Possible but highly unlikely, according to Washington state officials."

http://articles.latimes.com/2012/may/27/opinion/la-oe-mcfarling-tsunami-debris-20120527