Page 4 - Radiation Fallout News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Radiation fallout living here nuclear plants, can you put it into perspective for us? >> look, what potassium iodide does is fills any available spaces in the thyroid gland which might accept nuclear materiel, radiation. if you don't live within 30 miles of a nuclear reactor, you don't need it. its only use is within a couple of hours, 2, 3, 4 hours, maxium, if you have been exposed to radiation you take the potassium iodide and it goes to the thyroid and has nothing do with any other part of the body. it goes directly to the thyroid and occupies any space which radiation might fill. so, it is...

Aerial information saying the cooling of the overheated spent fuel pools is having little effect, meaning the water drops in the water cannons not doing the job at this point. reactor number three is still highly sensitive and the fuel pool is believed to be dangerously low. the japanese and u.s. governments have had different ways to deal with radiation fears, but now a team of specialists is headed to japan. they're going to give their best advice on manning the situation. >> chris lawrence with more on this operation and how they're trying to help. hey, chris. >> hey, kiran. hey, christin...

Radiation fallout could travel across the sea, but do they need to grab a geiger counter and start testing? our dan harris did exactly that. take a look. >> reporter: across america the radiation fears are palpable. there's a run on iodide pills, geiger counters and emergency kits on amazon.com and everywhere from hawaii -- >> i don't trust what they're saying. >> reporter: -- to seattle to missouri but how worried should we be? radiation is all around us and even inside of us all the time. it's perfectly natural and safe. to illustrate the point, we got ahold of this geiger counter. as you ca...

Possible radiation fallout here? >> reporter: first of all, we're having a hard time hearing you. anderson and i are together. we want to describe a couple things we've seen over the last few days. obviously the focus for me is how do you care for people who have been subjected to the tragedies, all the image that's we've seen over the last several days? you know, i had a chance to visit some of the hospitals. we were trying to take care of people who are injured, severely, but survived. it's really hard to imagine that they can even survive some of the image that's we've seen. but you know, u...

Here in the united states, we do that on big lakes. we do that on rivers. we put in a cooling tower so we need less water. but we, too, have a lot of reactors that are on the ocean, or on major bays. luckily, the east coast and gulf coast are not subject to tsunami. the west coast may be. but those are designed for tsunami. at least they're designed for the biggest tsunami we think they'd see. what happened in this case is this plant was hit by an earthquake and then a tsunami bigger than what it was designed for. >> matthew, thank you very much. i'm now going to go back to anderson cooper, wh...