Radioactive particles arriving in the Bay Area

While public health officials anxiously downplayed fears Thursday that a plume from Japan's crippled nuclear reactors was descending on California, scientists at UC Berkeley declared they were already detecting radioactive particles from 5,000 miles across the ocean.

"We see evidence of fission particles -- iodine, cesium, barium and krypton, a whole dog's breakfast of radiation," said Ed Morse, professor of nuclear engineering at UC Berkeley, whose students have set up a monitor on the rooftop of the campus's Etcheverry Building. A monitor at Lawrence Livermore Lab is also detecting the particles, he said. Mercury News