日本反应堆事故引发的恐慌

We wanna bring NBC chief science and health correspondent Robert Bazell. Bob, it's not just the Japanese people affected by the radiation. We had the Pentagon report that our aircraft carriers, the one that Richard was just talking about the Ronald Reagan, sailed through a radioactive cloud and then was coded with particulate radiation. So explain for all of us what those types of effects can possibly be for the people that were exposed.

Richard, I think it's a perfect example and it's not your fault, of course, at all, of hysteria of radiation. The Navy explains that the Ronald Reagan sailed and its helicopters sailed through an area where the sailors were exposed to as much radiation in a day as they might have been exposed from cosmic radiation that we all get exposed to in a month. That's far less radiation you get from a chest X-ray, about 1.000 as much as that. And it's even less radiation than you get from flying across country in an airplane. So we're talking about really tiny amounts of radiation. The things that have been released from the plant so far is a lot of concern that there could be if things go terribly wrong: a major release of radiation. And that is a big issue. But the amount of radiation that's been released so far is extremely tiny. And Ronald Reagan, don't forget, is a lot of nuclear power on there and their train to carry out nuclear power missions. So they have enormously sensitive detectors on that plane. And there was no sailors or anybody else outside the plant have required any kind of treatment. The only people who have been exposed to serious levels of radiation have been a few workers at the power plant. So there’s radiation and there's radiation and the fact it can be detected with extraordinary precise instruments like they have on the Ronald Reagan does not mean that a gigantic cloud has headed to Hawaii, California or any place else. It only means we have a very good ability to detect radiation.

All right.Bob Bazell in Tokyo for respond, thanks so much.