Trapped in such blobs, the oil from Deepwater Horizon will ride the Gulf Stream across the Atlantic. In years to come, some will wash up on European shores, and some will reach the Arctic Ocean and continue along global conveyor belts of currents.

As Congress gears up for a legislative response to the oil spill in the Gulf and energy reform more broadly, some political observers are increasingly worried that the deck may be stacked in private industry's favor.

The Energy Department has been legally obligated to relieve nuclear plants of radioactive spent fuel since February 1998, but hasn't lived up to that requirement, because, quite simply, the government hasn't found a permanent place to put it.

Vermont Yankee reported Friday afternoon that the radioactive isotope strontium has been located in the soil near where tritium had been discovered leaking at the Vernon nuclear power plant in January.

As little as 1/60th of the oil belching from a blown-out deep-sea BP well could be making it all the way up to the surface of the Gulf of Mexico right away, judging from the results of a field test of a similar scenario conducted in 2000 by a consortium including the Department of the Interior's Mineral Management Service and BP.

The latest video footage of the leaking Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico show that oil is escaping at the rate of 95,000 barrels — 4 million gallons — a day, nearly 20 times greater than the 5,000 barrel a day estimate BP and government scientists have been citing for nearly three weeks, an engineering professor told a congressional hearing Wednesday

Nuclear accidents may occur more often as atomic technology spreads and countries build more reactors, International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Yukiya Amano said.

However, more and more fishermen are suffering from bad headaches, burning eyes, persistent coughs, sore throats, stuffy sinuses, nausea, and dizziness. They are starting to suspect that BP is not telling them the truth.

Steven Wereley, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue University,....made a few simple calculations and came up with an astonishing value for the rate of the oil spill: 70,000 barrels a day — much higher than the official estimate of 5,000 barrels a day.