Radioactive Plume Begins Hitting U.S. West Coast On Friday (Don't Worry!)

TheLA Timesis so full of dumb, offensive, weeks-late stuff that it's always a shock to get a new, coherent report that seems to reflect the current News Situation:  

Small amounts of radioactive isotopes from the crippled Japanese nuclear power plant are being blown toward North America high in the atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean and will reach California as soon as Friday, according to experts ....

However, a computer model of atmospheric movements developed by the Belgian Institute for Space Aeronomy shows that the Fukushima plumes could travel across the Pacific, though the levels of radioactivity that could reach the West Coast of the U.S. remain unclear.

It appears that all of the models, however, are not based on measurements of radioactivity at the source and a projection of actual radioactive fallout in the U.S., but rather project a relative scale of radioactivity. Since Japanese authorities have said little about the amount of the releases at Fukushima, nobody can say how much radioactivity will hit California.