EPA Sending Additional Radiation Monitors to Alaska

Guam, Hawaii Also Sites of Monitors

March 16, 2011|By Kortnie Horazdovsky | KTUU.com

Photo Courtesy Alaska Department of Health and Social Services

ANCHORAGE, Alaska - — The Environmental Protection Agency is deploying additional radiation monitoring systems to Alaska, Guam and Hawaii to better monitor the situation in Japan. The Agency says placing additional monitors in Alaska, Guam and Hawaii allows it to gather data from a location closer to Japan.

The three Alaska monitors will be set up in Dutch Harbor, Nome and Juneau. They are expected to be operating by the end of the week, according to the EPA.

The EPA website says the agency, along with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, does not expect to see harmful levels of radiation reaching the United States from the damaged Japanese nuclear power plants.

The deployable radiation air monitors are able to be sent to any location in the U.S. or its territories during radiological emergencies.

“The fixed monitors do continuous air monitoring, so it's near real-time information that's sent via satellite connection to our national air and radiation environmental laboratory in Alabama,” said Jonathan Edwards, the director of the EPA’s Radiation Protection Division.

The state of Alaska reiterated that it too does not expect radioactive material to reach Alaska in any quantity that would produce health concerns.

The state says a spike in radiation levels in Japan overnight has since fallen significantly, and that snow and rain in Japan will partially clear the atmosphere of some of the radiation.

It continued, saying that low-level winds will carry the remaining radiation to sea, but the only way the atmospheric radiation can reach the U.S. is through the high-level jet stream, which is far south of Alaska for the next three days.

“The monitors are very good at monitoring background radiation and we would see upticks of it that would then cause our folks to talk a harder look at it, but again we don’t expect to see any kind of impact from the incident in Japan,” Edwards of the EPA said.

The state epidemiologist, Dr. Joe McLaughlin, said in a release that Alaskans should not take potassium iodide as a precaution against radiation exposure. He said that while potassium iodide can protect the thyroid gland from harmful radiation, it can produce adverse side effects and should only be taken if exposure to highly elevated doses of radiation is expected.

Two monitors will be placed in Guam and two in Hawaii.

Channel 2's Mike Ross also contributed to this report.

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