Alarm of the spread of radiation from the nuclear power plants in Japan has reached across the world, all the way to the United States. However, nuclear experts are trying to play down the danger so people won’t worry so much. “Very few people are going to get doses even comparable to a chest x-ray, which is a pretty low dose”, said David Brenner of the Centre of Radiological Research at Columbia University.

The dosage some people will get is only 1/10 of a millisievert, which is far less than the 20 millisieverts each year that nuclear plant workers are exposed to. To increase the risk of cancer, a person would need to be exposed to 100 in one day, and up to 500 could cause damage to the bone marrow, which could result in death. The current levels are still minute in comparison with the explosion at Chernobyl in 1986, but even then the problem for most people was not the radiation, but the fact that they continued eating contaminated food after the explosion.

In the United States, Miles O’Brien pointed out that for some reason, the tanks that kept the water pumping to cool the reactor were not buried underground like they are in the US. David Brenner, one of O’Brien’s colleagues, said that since the reactor had been around since 1971, the fact that it was 40 years old could be the key to the whole problem. He said the lifetime for a reactor was only supposed to be 25 years.