Low radioactivity seen heading towards N.America

VIENNA, (Reuters) – Low concentrations of  radioactive particles are heading eastwards from Japan’s  disaster-hit nuclear power plant and are expected to reach North  America in days, a Swedish official said today.
Lars-Erik De Geer, research director at the Swedish Defence  Research Institute, a government agency, was citing data from a  network of international monitoring stations established to  detect signs of any nuclear weapons tests.
Stressing that the levels were not dangerous for people, he  predicted the particles would continue across the Atlantic and  eventually also reach Europe.
“It is not something you see normally,” he said by phone  from Stockholm. But, “it is not high from any danger point of  view.”
He said he was convinced it would eventually be detected  over the whole northern hemisphere.
“It is only a question of very, very low activities so it is  nothing for people to worry about,” De Geer said.
“In the past when they had nuclear weapons tests in China  … then there were similar clouds all the time without anybody  caring about it at all,” he said.
Before he spoke, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission  advised any Americans living near Japan’s crippled Fukushima  nuclear plant to move at least 50 miles (80 km) away but it  played down the risks of contamination to the United States.
“All the available information continues to indicate  Hawaii, Alaska, the U.S. Territories and the U.S. West Coast are  not expected to experience any harmful levels of radioactivity,”  it said in a statement yesterday.
De Geer was commenting on data from the Comprehensive Test  Ban Treaty Organisation (CTBTO), a Vienna-based independent body  for monitoring possible breaches of the test ban.
He said he believed the radioactive particles would    “eventually also come here”.
The CTBTO has more than 60 stations around the world which  can pick up very low levels of radioactive particles such as  caesium and iodine isotopes.
It continuously provides data to its member states,  including Sweden, but does not make the details public.
The New York Times said a CTBTO forecast of the possible  movement of the radioactive plume showed it churning across the  Pacific, and touching the Aleutian Islands today before  hitting southern California late tomorrow.
It said health and nuclear experts emphasized that radiation  would be diluted as it travelled and at worst would have  extremely minor health consequences in the United States.
In a similar way, radiation from the Chernobyl disaster in  1986 spread around the globe and reached the west coast of the  United States in 10 days, its levels measurable but minuscule,  the newspaper said.  The CTBTO projection gave no information about actual  radiation levels but only showed how a radioactive plume would  probably move and disperse, it said.