

Tracking radiation levels in Japan - huslage
http://rdtn.org

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ake111
Just a lurker here, but whoever is running this site is clueless.

It lists figures like "800Gy/h" which is far higher than the radiation level
at Chernobyl, right after the accident, standing right beside the blown
reactor.

If you check the sources, the units are in nano Gy/h. Their conversion to
milliSievert is closer but still off by a factor of a 1000.

So the highest reading I can find is 700nGy/h at Hitatinaka:
<http://www.houshasen-pref-ibaraki.jp/present/result01.html>

If you turn that into a yearly dose, using a weighting factor of 1 as the
monitoring station website suggests, that's 6milliSievert/yr: the average
yearly dose from background radiation. Exciting!

There's really no justification to make such a website.

~~~
ugh
“There's really no justification to make such a website.”

That seems like a very strange conclusion. How did you arrive at that?
Wouldn’t it be good to know from yet another source that radiation levels
currently really are nothing to worry about?

~~~
ake111
Their text: "This ongoing crisis has highlighted the need for trusted sources.
With conflicting reports of radiation levels in affected areas, we wanted to
build a way to report and see data in an unbiased format.

This site is not meant as a replacement for government nor official nuclear
agencies. Our hope is that data sets from various sources can provide
additional context to the official word in these rapidly changing events. ..."

They're using loaded language. They don't say that the official reading are
not credible, but let's take a few measurements to make sure.

Background radiation levels vary quite a bit due to surrounding geographical
features. A reading from a government station is made under a controlled
environment, so a prolonged and large increase in their readings is a good
indicator of possible contributions from artificial sources. Getting people to
run around with consumer radiation meters isn't going to produce credible
data, especially when people are more likely to submit a sample if they "find"
an unusual reading.

Also, they're calling for contributions from people in Japan. Yet they do so
not in their native language. It seems to me that their intent is that they
want radiation readings primarily from English readers i.e. not Japanese.

~~~
ugh
So you have no problem with the concept, just this specific implementation?
There are more understandable ways of saying that.

------
munificence
Radiation dose chart...

<http://xkcd.com/radiation/>

~~~
rabidsnail
According to that chart 100 millisieverts/year (or 0.01 per hour) is linked to
increased cancer risk. The readings in cities near the reactor look like
between 0.1 and 0.8. Not good if it doesn't go down.

~~~
ghshephard
Right - Note, that those are rates per hour. Which means for the .8/Hour, you
are seeing 19.2 mSv/Day. You hit that 100 mSv total in about a week. That's
bad for two reasons, #1, it's exceeding the 100 mSv baseline, but also, I have
to believe that getting that much radiation in a week, instead of a year,
can't be good for you either.

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rgrieselhuber
This is a great idea but it would be much more useful if the pins were color-
coded to indicate danger levels.

~~~
nevinera
They are. Gray indicates a complete lack of danger. I'll ask them to add a
legend.

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w1ntermute
Anyone else find it ironic that all the people flying out of Tokyo are
exposing themselves to more radiation than those who remain there?

~~~
flatulent1
There's quite a bit of misleading info in some news reporting making numeric
comparisons between numbers representing different types of data (activity
totals versus exposure rates) and in some cases mismatching units too. At
least there seems to be plenty of monitoring going on in Japan, and wide
access to frequently updated data. NHK today was reporting the government
website now has hour by hour values tabulated. I think that's to help people
understand that the daily averages are mostly well below the peak values that
get attention. Using a peak hourly rate value for a daily or longer
calculation may cause people to over react. (Of course people may have other
exposure through food, water etc.)

Studying two other incidents, one at a Japanese fuel facility in 1999 (closed
in 2003) and the other with a U.S. army Idaho Falls (Dugway testing grounds)
reactor that went critical in an accident in 1961 provides insight into the
neutron-moderating behavior of water, and interesting case studies of exposure
to people after the initial events. Less known than three mile island, both
are significant.

<https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/SL-1>
[https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Tokaimura_nuc...](https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Tokaimura_nuclear_accident)

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flatulent1
It strikes me as a site for scamming people, <http://bit.ly/fgGX3a> sure
doesn't sound like a normal way to access the Red Cross. The retailing links
are fishy too.

~~~
mhiceoin
The Amazon link is an affiliate link, all others are clean. Bit.ly provides a
simple service to shorten links, and some additional features like click
counting.

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defrost
The Marian Steinbach blog entry "Japan Radiation Open Data" referenced in the
article has solid raw data links.

