Safecast is a global sensor network for collecting and sharing radiation measurements to empower people with data about their environments.

Safecasting Fukushima Live Report

May 3, 2012 19:26 May 3, 2012 19:26 May 3, 2012 19:26
 

Today we are Safecasting from Tokyo to Minami Soma, Fukushima. Driving today are Joe and Kalin with self in the back seat handling communications (ahem)


Today’s goal is to measure a hotspot we recently found on our map in Minami Soma, take soil samples, cover a few roads not covered yet, and meet with volunteers in Koriyama in the evening. So far we have had heavy traffic due to rain and Golden Week holiday rush, and we hope to achieve as much as possible. Total distance 500km back and forth.

On board we have a lot of measurement equipment – 8 bGeigies, 14 various geiger counters and 1 spectrometer (SAM940 3″). We also have tools for taking soil samples. Continue reading »

Safecast Geiger Counter Reference Design

March 14, 2012 23:06 March 14, 2012 23:06 March 14, 2012 23:06
 


The following is a post by contributing author bunnie, mirrored from the bunniestudios blog.

This past weekend marked the anniversary of the Tohoku-Oki earthquake that devastated Japan. I had not felt my blood so cold since I watched the twin towers fall almost a decade earlier. I still vividly remember the twisting knots I felt in my stomach as I watched the footage of a tsunami wiping out huge swathes of Japanese countryside. In a matter of hours, entire cities were washed off the map, leaving an eerie post-apocalyptic landscape of a few survivors weeping amongst twisted wreckage. Then, in the ensuing days, Fukushima Daiichi melted down, leaving in its wake one of the worst on-going radiation contamination crisis since Chernobyl.

I have good friends in Japan, and I visit often. I wanted to do something to help, but I didn’t know what I could do. I was connected by Joi Ito to Safecast, and I joined the effort to build an open sensor network that could aggregate trustable, source-neutral radiation monitoring data. Safecast itself has many talented and hard working volunteers who have done a remarkable job of achieving their goals by instrumenting Japan with radiation monitors and aggregating data through cleverly designed and rapidly deployable mobile monitoring capabilities.

I decided my tiny contribution to the effort would be to design a radiation monitor suitable for everyday civilian use. This is a preventative/preparedness measure, addressing the long-term issue of empowering a civilian population with few available options for power generation to self-monitor their environment. The problem with the current crop of radiation monitors is that they are basically laboratory instruments: accurate & reliable, but bulky, expensive, and difficult to use, requiring a degree in nuclear physics to understand exactly what the readings meant. Another problem with crises like these is that while radiation monitoring is important, it’s something that is typically neglected by the civilian population until it is too late. Continue reading »

Measuring Radiation in Snow

February 4, 2012 00:42 February 4, 2012 00:42 February 4, 2012 00:42
 

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.

Continue reading »

New Safecast Global Map

February 3, 2012 02:47 February 3, 2012 02:47 February 3, 2012 02:47
 

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!

World Karate Organization to do All Japan bGeigie Relay

January 14, 2012 11:51 January 14, 2012 11:51 January 14, 2012 11:51
 

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

Continue reading »

Safecast T-Shirts!

December 21, 2011 12:54 December 21, 2011 12:54 December 21, 2011 12:54
 

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 ***

  • December 21, 2011 12:54
  • Posted by sean on December 21, 2011 12:54
  •   Comments Off
  •   Featured, News

Safecasting Seabrook

November 15, 2011 16:52 November 15, 2011 16:52 November 15, 2011 16:52
 

Earlier this year this we had the pleasure of meeting some of the folks at C-10, which is one of the oldest citizen radiation monitoring groups in the world. Established in 1986, they work to address the health and safety issues related to the Seabrook Station nuclear power plant in New Hampshire and small sensor network dedicated to this. They shared their history and encouraged us in our efforts.

While much of our attention is on Japan, Fukushima specifically – and rightly so – we’ve realized the need for this kind of data in places that haven’t already had problems. If we had the kind of data that we have now for Fukushima, but from sometime before this year’s event, we’d know a lot more about what and how things happened. Because of this we’ve been working to measure other areas when we have the opportunity. Recently Safecast Advisor Ray Ozzie was near Seabrook with a newly built bGeigie and decided to drive around the plant a bit and add the readings to our database. Here’s the map of his readings:

Additionally, Ray writes:

…here are a couple of photos that I snapped during the drive. Given that it was a brisk November day, it was a bit surprising to see the windsurfer fly into the frame as I was snapping the photo. You can also see that the area is a great source of local lobster (and clams).

By zooming out this map [bing | google] (particularly the first one), scanning the boardwalk on Ocean Blvd, you can also get a sense of the plant’s proximity to the beach-going public during the summer. Hence the importance for the public to have good and open data on a continuous basis.

This is a good time to point out that part of Safecast’s mission is to help inform people about their environments and surroundings, with data they didn’t have access to before. We’re all surrounded by things which could potentially have a serious impact on our lives at any moment, being more aware of this can only be a good thing.

PBS story on Safecast

November 10, 2011 21:08 November 10, 2011 21:08 November 10, 2011 21:08
 

Earlier this year Miles O’Brien and Xeni Jardin joined us in Japan to learn a bit about Safecast and joined us on a trip through Fukushima – I blogged about the day when it happened. They were working on a piece for PBS which aired in the US tonight. The full segment is viewable above, and the transcript is available here. There is also a accessory story about some of the abandoned pets we saw on the trip. These are fantastic pieces that really capture what we’re trying to do with Safecast.

Also, here’s a related piece where Miles tells Hari Sreenivasan a bit about Safecast’s hacker roots.

A High School Student’s experience Safecasting

October 27, 2011 14:33 October 27, 2011 14:33 October 27, 2011 14:33
 

My name is Richard Zajac and I am a senior at a St. Louis, MO High School. I first learned about SafeCast when I began looking for information about the radiation levels in Japan in preparation for a visit filming a documentary. I soon discovered that SafeCast was the best source of this data, and that awareness of this data and these efforts should to be raised.

I spent my first few days in Tokyo at the Tokyo Hackerspace (Safecast’s ‘Operation Center’) I soon learned that an eclectic group of radiation industry experts, hardware and software experts, and all-around innovation minded individuals was hard at work developing this ‘Just-in-time’ system to track static and fluctuating radiation throughout Fukushima and Japan. Continue reading »

Safecasting inside the evacuation zone

September 20, 2011 16:12 September 20, 2011 16:12 September 20, 2011 16:12
 

If you’ve been following our measurements and discussions surrounding them, you know we’ve been saying that the decision to evacuate people in a set radius from the Fukushima Daiichi plant is flawed. Wind, weather, topography and many other factors ensure that radiation isn’t higher the closer you get to the plant, and lower further away, rather it’s higher in areas that had more fallout. We’ve measured some very high readings outside of the mandatory evacuation zones but until recently haven’t been able to get inside of the exclusion zone. Earlier this week a safecast volunteer was able to get inside with a bGeigie and took these readings. We’re excited to have this data finally and as you can see some of the areas that are much closer to the plant have lower radiation levels than some further away. Continue reading »

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