The Pentagon was expected to announce that the aircraft carrier Ronald Reagan, which is sailing in the Pacific, passed through a radioactive cloud from stricken nuclear reactors in Japan, causing crew members on deck to receive a month’s worth of radiation in about an hour, government officials said on Sunday.
The officials added that US helicopters flying missions about 60 miles north of the damaged reactors became coated with particulate radiation that had to be washed off.
There was no indication that any of the military personnel had experienced ill effects from the exposure.
However, these episodes showed that the prevailing winds were picking up radioactive material from crippled reactors in northeastern Japan. Ever since an earthquake struck Japan on Friday, the authorities worldwide have been laying plans to map where radioactive plumes might blow and determine what, if any, danger they could pose.
Japanese officials have insisted that unless the quake-damaged nuclear plants deteriorated into full meltdown, any radiation that reached the US would be too weak to do any harm.
Washington had “hypothetical plots” for worst-case plume dispersal within hours of the start of the crisis, a senior official said on Sunday.
The aim, the official added, was “more to help Japan” than the US, since few experts foresaw high levels of radiation reaching the US West Coast.
For now, the prevailing winds over Japan were blowing eastward across the Pacific. If they continue to do so, international stations for radioactive tracking at Wake or Midway Islands might detect radiation later this week, said Annika Thunborg, a spokeswoman for an arm of the UN in Vienna that monitors the planet for spikes in radioactivity.
“At this point, we have not picked up anything” in detectors midway between Japan and Hawaii, Thunborg said in an interview on Sunday.
“We’re talking a couple of days — nothing before Tuesday — in terms of picking something up.”
In the US, the Departments of Defense and Energy maintain large facilities and cadres of specialists to track airborne releases of radiation, both civilian and military.
On Sunday, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission said it expected no “harmful levels of radioactivity” to move on the winds to Hawaii, Alaska or the West Coast from the reactors in Japan, “given the thousands of miles between the two countries.”
Some private nuclear experts called a windborne threat unlikely. Others urged caution.
The plume issue has arisen before. In 1986, radiation spewing from the Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine was spread around the globe on winds and reached the West Coast in 10 days. It was judged more of a curiosity than a threat.
Since then, scientists have refined their ability to monitor such atmospheric releases. The advances are rooted in the development of new networks of radiation detectors, flotillas of imaging satellites and the advent of supercomputers that can model the subtle complexities of the wind to draw up advanced forecasts.
While federal officials expected little danger in the US from Japanese plumes, they were taking no chances. On Sunday, US Energy Department officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the agency was working on three fronts.
One main player is the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. Officials said they had activated its National Atmospheric Release Advisory Center, which draws on meteorologists, nuclear scientists and computer scientists to forecast plume dispersal.
“We’re on top of this,” a department official said.
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