Intermittency is an essential property of turbulent atmosphere, and is one of the core content in modern turbulence theory. But, when we consider the problem of wave propagation in turbulent atmosphere, we always evade this property and use the assumption of a Gaussian probability distribution of dielectric permittivity fluctuation. In this paper, we discussed the intermittent effects on light propagation in turbulent atmosphere. According to the fact that the variance of dielectric permittivity fluctuation is very small, we explicitly expanded the equations of optical statistical moments to the fourth-order cumulant functions and considered their solutions. As for the second-order moment which is important i n optical applications, we have analyzed it emphatically by the hierarchical str uctures model. Our results indicate that the optical effects of turbulent interm ittency are negligible and the conventional Gaussian assumption is rational.