Wednesday, March 16, 2011

EPA adds seven more monitors, boosts radiation-sniffing system

Federal agencies are beefing up their radiation-monitoring capabilities at home and abroad, even as they insist that significant amounts of fallout won’t waft from Japan onto U.S. territory.

At home, the Environmental Protection Agency said it's adding seven monitors in Alaska, Hawaii and Guam to its RadNet radiation-tracking system, which operates about 100 air-sniffing stations nationwide. Putting in those extra stations "allows us to gather data from a position closer to Japan," EPA said in an online question-and-answer guide.

Looking beyond America's borders, the U.S. Air Force is sending out a high-tech aircraft to sniff the air over Japan for radiation. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration are also sending experts to Japan to help counter the growing crisis at Japan's Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant complex.

The NRC and the NNSA have teams who track how hazardous materials spread through the atmosphere, based on computer modeling and other methods. It was the NRC's revised analysis that led to today's advisory telling Americans to evacuate the area within 50 miles (80 kilometers) of the Fukushima reactors, or stay indoors if they can't get out of the area.

White House spokesman Jay Carney acknowledged that the NRC's advice goes far beyond what the Japanese government is telling its own citizens — that is, to keep indoors within a 19-mile (30-kilometer) radius of the plant.

"The advice the Japanese government is giving — based on information it has — is different from the advice that we would be giving if this incident were happening in the United States of America," Carney said. "It is not about the quality of information. It is about the standards set by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission here in the United States and the kind of advice it would be giving should this incident happen in the United States."

For what it's worth, the NRC calls for protective action when projected doses exceed 10 millisieverts (1 rem) or 50 millisieverts (5 rem) to the thyroid. Radiation levels at the damaged plants rose as high as 400 millisieverts per hour.

How the calculations are made and the rest of the story.

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