The Vermont Health Department says it’s begun monitoring for radiation from the Japanese nuclear plant damaged by an earthquake and tsunami earlier this month.
The health department says harmful amounts of radiation are not expected to reach the U.S., and no radiation related to the disaster in Japan has been detected in Vermont.
But Health Commissioner Doctor Harry Chen says there is a chance that amounts of radioactivity that are too low to be detected may travel through the air and accumulate over time in Vermont soil, sediment and fungi.
Chen says that is what happened following the 1986 release of radiation from the damaged Russian nuclear Chernobyl plant and after decades of above-ground nuclear weapons testing in Nevada that followed World War II.