Photo gallery: A Sunday drive through the Fukushima fallout zone
By Sean Bonner
7 August 2011 The Safecasting drives officially started after my last trip to Japan, so I’ve been watching from afar as Pieter and an ever growing volunteer team of total heros have set out time and time again to try and map the radiation levels in the areas surrounding the Fukushima plant, as well as the rest of Japan. Knowing that I was going to be back in Tokyo for a number of Safecast meetings and the Radiation Seminar at the same time that Miles O’Brien and Xeni Jardin were going to be working on a story for PBS News Hour that had some focus on Safecast, organizing a drive seemed like an obvious option. This morning Pieter, Xeni and I set out with Miles, along with father/son superteam Joe and Bryan Moross. The plan was to drop off a few Geiger counters with volunteers and try to cover some some new ground, perhaps near the exclusion zone. But it ended up being so much more. The day began in Shinjuku around close to 7:30am when we picked up a rental car, this was a large group with a lot of gear so we had a need for two vehicles and the usual Safecast car on its own wasn’t quite enough. We wasted no time and started driving north. Depending on where you are in the city, background radiation levels in Tokyo hover right around 50 CPM which is only slightly higher than what we believe they were prior to 3/11 though we weren’t measuring things then so can’t be positive. For our purposes we are assuming the average around the country was 35 CPM which is worth noting before I start mentioning numbers going forward. It wasn’t too long in our trip before we hit our first hotspot in Nasu. […] It was here that we took our highest and most concerning readings of the day. The parking lot of the restaurant was active, but less than we’d just seen. But when we walked across the street – maybe 10 feet away, we measured over 20,000 CPM and 9 µSv/hr. We pulled out our SAM 940 to try and identify the isotopes and found things we weren’t expecting at all. So we grabbed some samples to send to a lab for professional analysis and got out of there quick. […]
