While we are playing basketball, OVS freshmen Anthony Ho said” Hey! It’s raining, so we better go back to our room, because the rain has radioactive materials in it!” People in United States, especially in the west coast are aware of the radiation which leaks from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan.

However, Nolan Hertel, nuclear engineering researcher at Georgia Institute of Technology, said the United States is thousands of miles from the leaks and once the radiation gets into the air, it disperses and dilutes as the wind blows it.

Although the radioactive caesium and iodine can dissolve in water, they have short half life. For example, iodine-131 has a half life of eight days, which means after eight days, half of the iodine will disappear. Also, iodine-131 will disintegrate into an unstable form of xenon and then become stable xenon, which is not harmful. Moreover, the distance between Los Angeles and Chernobyl is about 6,246 miles; Los Angeles to Fukushiima Daiichi is about 5,368 miles. When the Chernobyl nuclear accident happened, there is no evidence of health effects in America. In addition, the accident in Chernobyl is worse than the one in Japan. So the more serious issue that America need to worry about is not the radioactive material, is whether their nuclear power plants are also susceptible to these kinds of problem when a natural disaster happens.