If you don't want to be exposed to radiation, don't drink the water in Japan.
Or . . . gulp . . . breathe the air in Anaheim.
The Japanese government today says elevated levels of radioactive iodine from a crippled
nuclear plant were detected at a water treatment plant that serves Tokyo and five surrounding cities.
Infants (children younger than 1) should not drink or bathe in tap water, the Japanese government warn.
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Meanwhile, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) says locals have nothing to fear from the radiation detected in the air in Anaheim and Riverside.
Monitors in air filters checked this past weekend through Monday found “all of the radiation levels detected during the
detailed filter analysis are hundreds of thousands to millions of times
below levels of concern,” reads an EPA statement on testing in Anaheim Riverside and San Francisco.
“In a typical day,” the EPA adds, “Americans receive doses of radiation from natural
sources like rocks, bricks and the sun that are about 100,000 times
higher than what we have detected coming from Japan. For example, the
levels we're seeing coming from Japan are 100,000 times lower than what
you get from taking a roundtrip international flight.”
Here are the Anaheim results (all units are in picocuries-per-meter cubed):
Cesium-137: 0.0017
Tellurium-132: 0.012
Iodine-132: 0.0095
Iodine-131: 0.046
Riverside results:
Cesium-137: 0.00024
Tellurium-132: 0.0014
Iodine-132: 0.0015
Iodine-131: 0.011
As near as we can tell from our underground nuclear bomb shelter, the noses of EPA officials did not grow as they released the findings. Of course, growing third eyes woulda been even scarier.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.