By- Joey Jackson
With the nuclear disaster in Japan continuing to be problematic, Americans are starting to wonder how it could potentially effect us here and what to look for when it does.
Unfortunately, radiation is impossible to detect from just human senses and most people do not own a radiation detector. So, instead, the U.S. government is taking steps to shield its inhabitants from the possibility of radiation illnesses.
So far, the amount of radiation found by these tests in American soil from the Fukushima plant disaster has been minimal.
Small traces of radiation were found in milk on the west coast of California shortly after the Fukushima disaster, but according to John Moulder, a professor of radiation oncology at the Medical College of Wisconsin, these traces of radiation are not a threat.
“This amount of radiation is tiny, tiny, tiny compared to what you get from natural sources every day,” Moulder commented about the situation.
Fish, however, have been more of a worry as seawater off the coast of Japan has been radiated to 7.5 million times the legal limit after 11,000 tons of radioactive water that was used to cool the plant was dumped into the Pacific Ocean.
The current nuclear situation has people around the world in fear of what is to come, but here at Penn Manor, students are hardly disturbed.
“I haven’t even thought about it,” senior Ande Olson said. “I mean I’ve thought about the crisis, but I never even considered it affecting me.”
These radioactive fish have officials uneasy as they wonder how it will effect the world’s seafood industry since the Japanese seafood industry has been struggling since the tsunami hit its shores on March 11.
All of these factors contributed to the officials’ decision to raise Japan’s nuclear crisis to level seven, the maximum level and equivolent to that of the 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe.
Only time will tell how the disaster will play out, and officials believe it will be a long time indeed as predictions for the clean-up have gone in excess of a few decades.