In a post I wrote last year about one of our drives through Fukushima I mentioned toward the end that we met up with Koroyama resident Tadao Mumakata when he was driving by and recognized the Safecast logo on someone’s shirt and stopped to talk to us. At that point he was working with some other folks to produce a geiger counter in Fukushima. Since then he’s become a regular Safecast volunteer and continued diligently working on his project. When I was just in Japan I was able to see of the results, as they’ve got two models available now. One is a standalone unit and the other has no display, and instead includes a line out and needs to connect to a smartphone running an app like Geigerbot. Both of these devices are based on the Open Geiger project and have a Russian SBM-40 Geiger Mueller tube which is sensitive to beta and gamma radiation. We’re all really excited to see this project develop and it’s great to have something like this being produced directly in Fukushima.
Toshikatsu Watanabe of Inter Market Design created this pamphlet in Japanese to explain the mission and activities of Safecast to the citizens of Fukushima. Please feel free to download and use!
Last month we were excited to announce that the World Karate Organization was jumping into the pool of Safecast volunteers and would be mapping out some new territory for us and helping us test our a new version of our bGeigie, that for this specific purpose we’re calling it the “Black Belt bGeigie”. We’re excited to say we’ve begun receiving data from them already and their new coverage of Sapporo is in our database now. New ground is always exciting for us, and new ground with normal levels is even better. We’re looking forward to the next batch of data and continuing to fill in the empty spaces on our maps!
Safecast is powered by volunteer efforts, and we’re always open for more help. We’ve got a big task ahead of us and it’s going to take a lot of helping hands to make happen. Luckily a lot of people want to help, so many in fact that we can’t keep up with them – a good problem to have, but a problem none the less. We’re looking for someone to join our ranks as something of a volunteer wrangler. Sound interesting? Excellent, here’s who we’re hoping to find:
- Bilingual – Our team includes English and Japanese speakers, we need you to be able to easily communicate with both of them.
- Communication – Now that you can speak to the team, what will you tell them? We need someone who can stay on top of the situation and make sure that people who want to help have something to do.
- Optimization – Some of our volunteers might be better at some things than others, and some of them might benefit from teaming up. We need you to talk with everyone and see where those alignments and adjustments can be made.
- Assessment – We get a lot of offers to help, which is great, but sometimes people genuinely want to help but don’t really have the time or aren’t in a position to do anything right now, we need you to keep on top of inbound offers and respond to people accordingly.
- Location doesn’t matter – As long as you have an internet connection, you can do this.
Does this sound like you? If so, drop me a line ( sean@safecast.org )
On January 22-23 it snowed heavily in Tokyo. To see if it affects radiation measurements I ran out with a few geiger counters to see if I could detect any change.
Snow in Tokyo
To measure the fresh snow I used 3 geiger counters and absorption filters:
- Inspector Alert with 2″ pancake for measurement in CPM
- Thermo B20 for measurement in Bq/cm2 (calibration setting for Cesium, so will be off in case of other nuclides)
- Thermo PRD for gamma dose rate in uSv/hr
Snow activity measurement
Well, I did measure quite different levels compared to what the “normal” post-Fukushima levels are in my neighborhood (background typically around 30-40 CPM or 0.05-0.07 uSv/hr on the PRD). I used a cloth to capture fresh snow fall as opposed to measuring snow that already had accumulated.
For the last few months our visualization team at MIT in Cambridge lead by Anthony DeVincenzi have been working hard on some new visualizations of our data, the first of those is live now. This has a number of improvements from our earlier maps in that you can link directly to any specific location and zoom level, see census data in Japan overlayed to get an idea how many people are in some of these areas, customize the appearance and get some pretty specific details about the measurements themselves. That’s in addition to showing off the more then 2,000,000 data points we’ve collected so far. We’re really excited about this new map, as well as what’s to come in the future. Hope this is helpful for you as well!
Earlier this week there was news that The San Onofre Nuclear Power Plant, just south of Los Angeles, was shut down due to a leak. This obviously caught our attention and luckily Safecaster Mike Outmesguine was nearby with a bGeigie and immediately drove over to measure the situation. As you can see from his readings we haven’t detected any elevated levels on the public roads closest to the plant so any leak they detected was likely contained within the plant. We’ll remeasure this area again soon and keep an eye on it, but for the moment this is fantastic news.
On December 2nd, we handed one bGeigie to the Kenji Midori, the President of the World Karate Organization (WKO), or in Japanese “Shinkyokushinkai”. The WKO is well known in Japan and world wide for organizing the Karate World Championships. Actually the 10th World Cup was just held here in Tokyo.
from left to right: Sakurako Shima, Pieter Franken, WKO President Midori, and JAM
The Japanese New Year started with an M7.0 earthquake centered at an island 600km south of Tokyo, but the quake was still strong enough to shake a very widespread area of northern Japan including Fukushima to a Level 4 of the Japanese local intensity scale of 7 levels.
Come January 2, Fukushima Prefecture’s official radiation monitoring system showed an unusual increase in cesium fallout from an ND (not detected) on January 1 to 432MBq/km2 on January 2.
Fukushima Prefecture fallout around January 2, 2012
Not in time for the holidays! We’ve had a few shirts made one at a time here and there and keep getting requests for them so we decided it was time to finally have some available for everyone else. Since this is our first merchandise offering we’re keeping it simple with a 2 color logo on the front of either a black, blue or grey shirt. We only made a few of each of these kind of just to test the waters – we’ll print some more once these are gone but depending on feedback we might do some variations on the design or use different color shirts.
As a bonus, any order received before January 1, 2012 will get some free Safecast stickers thrown in!
*** Order yours here ***
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