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=Radiation from Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant reaches California; experts: no health risk= BY Nancy Dillon DAILY NEWS WEST COAST BUREAU CHIEF

Originally Published:Friday, March 18th 2011, 3:41 PM Updated: Friday, March 18th 2011, 3:49 PM APAn Environmental Protection Agency RadNet (radiation network) monitor measures the radioactivity in the air in San Francisco FridayLOS ANGELES - Trace amounts of radiation from Japan's nuclear crisis have reportedly reached California - but they're nowhere near hazardous levels.

"(They're) about a billion times beneath levels that would be health threatening," a diplomat with access to radiation tracking by the U.N.'s Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization told the Associated Press.

The diplomat in Vienna said the initial reading came from an unnamed measuring station operated by the CTBTO, apparently in Sacramento.

Experts agree that any fallout wafting 5,500 miles across the Pacific to California will be too diluted to pose a health risk.

"It would be less than one microsievert," Dr. Keisuke Iwamoto, a radiation biologist at UCLA, told the Daily News. "To give you some perspective, a chest x-ray might be 100 microsieverts."

Still, some jittery residents are hoarding anti-radiation pills and fretting over the invisible threat as weather systems beat a path between the crippled Fukushima Daiichi plant and California.

"We've sold maybe 40 or 50 personal radiation detectors to people in California," Al Evan, the CEO of Security Pro USA in Los Angeles, told the Daily News. "Even though the radiation threat is minute, people are very concerned. We sold about a thousand packets of potassium iodide pills in two days. We're sold out."

California officials, meanwhile, said they're screening locally produced milk for any radiation contamination transmitted by grass-eating cows.

It's a precautionary measure, they said, since harmful levels are not expected to affect the milk supply.

An estimated 4,000 kids developed thyroid cancer after consuming milk contaminated with radioactive iodine after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, according to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

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