the ocean. the company running this power plant is basically trying to make more room to store water which has a high level of radio activity. at the same time there is water because of this disaster which is much more dangerous in the number two reactor s turbine building. it s so radioactive it s shut down efforts to get the cooling systems at the reactor running again. now the company is dumping more than 11,000-tons of radioactive wastewater to make room for this other more dangerous water. if they get this into storage they should be able to resume efforts to get the cooling systems back online, which means they will no longer be pumping so much water into the buildings and there would be less contamination. jon: do very this any idea how much radioactive water is going into the ocean. absolutely not. it s been flowing into the ocean for days now.
has in the food supply. these are really tyiny amounts. how much of an increase over what we are used to though? it s trivial. we live in a radioactive world. we eat radioactive elements every day. bana bananas are a big source of radioactive potassium. there is more radio activity in a banana than a liter or two quarts of the milk that was detected with the iodine levels. just to give you an idea, every day we drink a little radium and eat potassium and uranium in our food and breathing in radon right now. it s low level stuff and we don t have that much concern. this amount of radiation that
place. so these sensors, they can, you know, determine the source of the radiation and it s, you know, much smaller than anything that s going to impact human health. there was a little bit of radio activity found in milk in walk state this week and it was about 5,000 times lower than the limit for the fda to take action. okay. that sounds find right now, okay, but this shows no sign of stopping any time soon, this radio activity being released into the air. right. i mean, how confident are we that this is going to be just fine and no one is going to have any adverse ill side effects here in the states or elsewhere? right, right. the concern is obviously in japan and the radiation being released in japan and that s obviously very worrisome. the workers on the site are battling very difficult conditions. but, you know, the plant, it s 5,000 miles away from the west coast of the united states. and so that fallout, that debris, the dust particles
non-contaminated fish down the road? that s right and certainly any fish that would be very close to the reactor plants could ingest some quantities of radioactive elements and that s true. that would have to be monitored closely. the water is just dilution as it spreads out over the thousands and thousands of miles. with the churning as you say and normal process of dispersion within the water would reduce the levels further and further away from the coast line how concerns are you that there is an increase in radioactive material detected in u.s. milk? i m not concerned at all. these levels are incredibly low. we have such sensitive detectors in the united states that we can detect tiny quantities of radio activity. here s the problem.
carrying radiation, with they have 5,000 miles to disburse and to spread out over the ocean. and so it s really you know, for the facility to be on the pacific ocean, that s really the best place for it. obviously, it s not a good situation. it s a very dire situation in japan. but for the radio activity to be disbursed over the ocean, that s the best situation for it. brian, you know, you mentioned the workers and the people in japan who are exposed to this. in particular, i want to talk about those workers. you probably heard the story about one of the mothers of the one of the 50, they expect to die. that is not a dramatic conclusion, is it, that they realize the levels they are being exposed to could do that to them? well, you know, we ve gotten some conflicting information on how much radiation the workers on the site are being supposed to. some have been hospitalized.