I'm involved in a lot of environmental issues these days, but there was one cause that got me started: Fighting back against radiation poisoning. My first big environmental case, more than two decades ago, involved the hidden dangers of radiation exposure in the Gulf Coast oil patch. My clients were small business owners and their workers in Laurel, Miss., who cleaned out the pipes used for oil drilling; their customers -- including Big Oil icons like Shell and Chevron -- never told them that the residue, or scale, coating these pipes was highly radioactive. Some of the workers were sickened, and our investigation even showed that these radioactive pipes were being re-used to build school playgrounds. Yet to this day, many Americans don't know that so much radioactive waste is produced by Big Oil, and that it's so frequently dumped improperly. I bring up this history to speak to a broader truth: As a society, we continue to downplay the threat from radiation exposure. Sometimes a big nuclear event grasps our attention; indeed, the news that continues to emerge from the Fukushima catastrophe in Japan has spotlighted some of its alarming and ongoing effects, including mutations in butterflies and contaminated bluefin tuna off ...
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