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

The bGeigie Nano Kit

March 22, 2013 05:17 March 22, 2013 05:17 March 22, 2013 05:17
 


The biggest limitation Safecast has faced in collecting data is the limited availability of our workhorse device, the bGeigie. The design works great, but it’s expensive (each one costs us about $1000) and time consuming (building one can take an entire week) which results in us having limited numbers of them to keep in use. We have way more people who want to drive around with bGeigie’s than we have bGeigie’s to be driven around. To solve this issue, we’ve created the bGeigie Nano, and thusly the bGeigie Nano Kit. As you might guess the Nano is a smaller form factor which makes it much easier to carry around and use, yet it’s even more feature packed than the original bGeigie. In fact many Safecast team members use the Nano’s exclusively now and carry them at all times, the compact size makes this incredibly easy to do.

Most importantly, the nano is a fairly simple kit comprised of readily available off the shelf parts. If you know how to solder (or want to spent 10 minutes learning how) you can build the Nano Kit in an evening, and be Safecasting the next day. You can take individual spot readings, or attach it to your car and drive around collecting geotagged radiation data that can be uploaded to Safecast via our API upload page. This is the exact same process we use. The design (hardware and software) is open source (just like all Safecast projects) so you are invited to hunt down each part on your own, but to make things simple we’ve teamed up with Medcom to provide a kit that you can build yourself. The cost will be $450 and they will be selling them on a first come first serve basis in batches as the kits are produced. If you want one, fill out this bGeigie Nano interest form and someone will follow up with you in short order.

More photos and technical details after the jump.
[All photos by Pieter Franken]

Continue reading »

Why is “Is it safe?” a hard question?

March 5, 2013 06:30 March 5, 2013 06:30 March 5, 2013 06:30
 

Top or bottom? Safe or not?

We are getting a lot of questions, both at info@safecast.org and through the Safecast group from concerned people – they all try to understand some aspect of radiation or another. And of course, many people ask similar questions, but without doubt the most often asked question is “Is [something] safe?” or a variation of it. Believe it or not, there is an answer in our radiation FAQ, but people keep asking ;-)

Recently someone who was planning to spend a few months in Kyushu asked about the contamination there. He had located some info on the radiation levels, and had concluded that currently the radiation level is higher than before 3/11. He asked if that was because of Caesium and Strontium contamination. In fact, he was comparing two different data sets that had been collected differently. I pointed him to DPNSNNE which allows users to download consistent monitoring data from all over the country and compare the changes over time. This data shows that aerial radiation levels in Kyushu are the same now as they were before the accident. As often happens in forums/mailing lists, once the question was answered, the discussion shifted the topic to “the difference in risk from Radon (naturally occurring) compared to Caesium and Strontium (anthropogenic)”. Immediately, data on half-lives (=time that it takes for the half of a certain amount of a radioactive isotope to decay) of Rn, Cs-137, Cs-134 and Sr-90 was put on the table as “evidence” and difference between half-life and biological half-life was discussed. So the question transformed into:

  • Since the (radiological) half-life of Radon is only 4 days, while Cs-134/137 has a biological half-life of 70 days (that is, half of it will be eliminated from the body in 70 days), and Strontium’s is 18 years, doesn’t that mean that radon is less risky than the others?

I had been thinking about this a lot and thought I might be able to explain it by example; an example that turned into this blog post (Here is a good place to thank Azby, Jam and everybody who read through my ramblings and pushed me to publish it). Continue reading »

Information, Misinformation, Disinformation (or, “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.”) Part 1

December 29, 2012 18:07 December 29, 2012 18:07 December 29, 2012 18:07
 

Whose job is it to make this stuff easy to understand?

“YOU CAN’T ALWAYS FIND WHAT YOU’RE LOOKING FOR…..”
[Skip to Part 2] At Safecast we assumed from the start that our data should be accurate, easy to understand, informative, well-visualized, and easily accessible. In many respects this simply reflects “best practices” in information design, as well as a vision of social responsibility in which openness and transparency are paramount virtues. So when we make decisions about how to present our data, we adhere to principles of intuitiveness, depth, context, and dare we say it, beauty in design. We want to make it as easy as possible (AEAP) for people to find what they’re looking for, and to find out what it means. That’s why we’re continually miffed when official sources of information seem to be operating under an entirely different set of assumptions.

To be honest, the seriousness of government missteps and opacity during the early weeks of the disaster led us to accommodate ourselves to vastly lowered expectations in terms of the quality and accessibility of information we’d probably see from official sources. Even though it’s their job, and they are legally required to provide many kinds of information, many of us prepared ourselves for endless tooth-pulling and fact-checking about radiation information. So first, I’d like to give a sort of brief status update:
1) The government has made a lot of information available, more than we expected (because we expected nothing).
2) It still needs to be scrutinized, fact-checked, and independently confirmed.
3) There are still some areas where a lot of us have been pulling teeth for months and still haven’t been able to get the information we’re looking for.

So let’s just agree to live with #2 and #3 for the moment. It means constant effort on our part, but enough of us are constitutionally well-equipped for this kind of research-based tug-of-war that it’s not really that onerous at this point. We get good at it, we build trust, and people who were once opponents sometimes become allies, because frankly, they need our help.

But #1 is where we find ourselves really scratching our heads. There is all sorts of official information available, and a lot of it is proving reliable, but it’s rarely as easily accessible or informative as it should be. In fact, locating and using the data is usually as difficult as possible (ADAP) considering how easy it is now to find good information and web designers, and how inexpensive it has become. It should be easy to do a good job, if the people in charge really care about doing a good job. Continue reading »

Information, Misinformation, Disinformation (or, “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.”) Part 2

December 29, 2012 18:06 December 29, 2012 18:06 December 29, 2012 18:06
 

A MEXT radiation monitoring post, aka “droid,” of a common type manufactured by NEC . This one is at the former Akasawa Elementary School in Aizu-Misato.

GOVERNMENT MONITORING POSTS

[Part 1 here] In recent months there has been a fair amount of controversy concerning the accuracy of the radiation monitoring posts the government has installed all over Fukushima prefecture, and in some neighboring prefectures as well. We wrote about it back in July, 2012:

TEPCO cheating on radiation levels by using “improved” monitoring posts

There are almost 700 of these monitoring posts (675 at latest count), which we refer to as “droids” because of how they look (see photo above). They are all powered by solar panels and use storage batteries.
[Update: 2700 monitoring posts have been installed as of Feb. 2013]
Through the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology (MEXT), the government spent a lot of money (we haven’t been able to find out precisely how much) to have them installed, and spent more money to have a web site made that displays the readings: MEXT realtime environmental radiation page

From this reasonably attractive-looking page, users are supposed to click on a prefecture, then on a region of the prefecture, and then choose from any one of a dozen or more municipalities. Then a scrolling list appears on the right hand side, and users can select a particular monitoring post to review (In the case of Koriyama City in Fukushima, there are 393 monitoring posts in the list). A zoomable, scrollable Google Fusion map appears, and the individual posts are marked by colored dots. Clicking a dot gives the current reading at that location, updated very 10 minutes it seems, and it is possible to download data for the entire month. So, thank you for doing that much, at least, MEXT.

This system sucks in many ways. While working with it in order to compare the MEXT readings with our own, we’ve found that it’s impossible to get an overview of more than a small part of Fukushima at any one time, that hunting down particular locations is incredibly time consuming and frustrating, that the cumulative time data does not go back far enough, and that the downloadable data comes with many restrictions and is difficult to pull down efficiently. Yes, MEXT made this system ADAP — As Difficult As Possible. Continue reading »

NORWAY STILL RADIOACTIVE 26 YEARS AFTER CHERNOBYL

May 29, 2012 16:00 May 29, 2012 16:00 May 29, 2012 16:00
 

2012 CESIUM MAP FOR JOTUNHEIMEN, NORWAY

26 years have passed since the Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster. Many countries in Europe were affected of the radioactive fallout, including Norway which is roughly 2500 kilometers away from Chernobyl.

On May 18, 2012 The Norwegian Radiation Protection Authority (NRPA) reported about a new helicopter survey (covering 3000 square kilometer) of the mountainous area in central Norway called Jotunheimen (home of the giants) which contains the highest mountain in North Europe (Galdhopiggen 2469m / 8100feet) and a large high-mountain plateau called Valdresflye which is the feeding area for about 7500 reindeer. 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 »

Safecast will be sharing radiation measurements with Minamisoma City

March 3, 2012 19:32 March 3, 2012 19:32 March 3, 2012 19:32
 
On February 21st we visited Minamisoma City’s Environmental Public Health Section under the Department of Civic Life.  As one of the municipalities near the nuclear plants, Minamisoma has been receiving a good amount of media coverage recently.  The city has expressed a strong interest in radiation measurements, and individual citizens are demanding that they want to know the radiation conditions as well.

At the meeting Minamisoma accepted the proposal for Safecast to make bGeigie measurements supplied by groups cooperating with Safecast activities available on the web and the city agreed to make use of such data.  It was also decided to provide a link to the Safecast.org website from Minamisoma City’s website.

Safecast volunteers will support groups taking measurements covering nearly all areas in Minamisoma City and Safecast will publicly release this measurement data as it is available.  These activities will start in March and are expected to be accomplished over a few weeks.

In the back row from left to right are Safecast’s Yuka, Rob Oudendijk and Mr Watanabe.  On the far right in the back row is Mr. Washiyama who is the contact person supporting this effort.

In front of the radiation monitoring display at the Minamisoma City Hall.  Mr. Watanabe (on the right) from Koriyama who arranged our meetings and Mr. Nishikawa (on the left, author of this post.)

Reported by Eiji Nishikawa
Translated by Steve Rife

Safecasting Seoul, Korea & Hong Kong, China

October 14, 2011 07:09 October 14, 2011 07:09 October 14, 2011 07:09
 

Is the radiation level in Japan higher, equal, or lower than in neighbouring countries to Japan that did not (yet) experience a Nuclear Disaster?

I decided to find out, so I packed a bGeigie in my check-in luggage when leaving on a business trip to Seoul, Korea, and Hong Kong, China. After arriving at Incheon airport in the evening of September 23, I immediately asked my Korean business partner, that picked me up in his car, if it would be all right to mount the bGeigie on the rear window of his car. Surprised, but complying, we soon drove the 1 1/2 hour trip from Incheon to Dongdaemun in the centre of Seoul.

As you can see from the Safecasting Map, leaving Incheon Airport we soon hit a high of 99CPM / 0.283uSv/h, while in the centre of Seoul we saw a more comfortable 40CPM / 0.114uSv/h to 50CPM / 0.253uSv. The Incheon levels are only a bit below the levels we see near the hotspot in Chiba, while the downtown Seoul levels are similar to the levels we measure in central Tokyo. On average the levels in Seoul could even be considered a bit higher than the average levels of Tokyo. But there is no significant difference. So is it safe to visit Seoul considering radiation?

I also took a couple of 1meter air measurements with the Inspector while walking around streets in the centre of Seoul, and found typical readings of 0.14uSv/h – 0.15uSV/h.

Around mid day of September 26 I arrived in sunny Hong Kong. Since no one was scheduled to pick me up, I went to the taxi stand and asked the kind driver if it would be OK to mount my bGeigie on the window of the taxi on my ride to Central, Hong Kong? Interestingly, despite of the past Great Britain Connection, many taxi drivers in Hong Kong only speaks basic, rudimentary English, but a big smile goes a long way :-) I have included a couple of photos to illustrate how the bGeigie was comfortable riding on the outside of the taxi window. Yes, the bGeigie just works! No problems locking on to GPS satellites.

After leaving Hong Kong International Airport we soon picked up 93CPM / 0.266uSv/h, but had ups and downs on the way in towards Central. The surprising thing was that the peak value I saw of 104CPM / 0.297uSv/h happened as we drove through Central. Later I experienced that the Inspector ticket away at a highish 100CPM while on the night stand in my hotel room! So naturally I took it out for a walk in the Harbour area where I would get readings of up to 124CPM near the soil (5cm), and 0.32uSv/h at one meter.

So this confirmed what I already had heard about Hong Kong: that the general radiation level here is highish, and actually beyond the Tokyo average even after Fukushima!

So, now it is time to ask which is safer of Hong Kong, Seoul, and Tokyo based on the data available? Safecast stands for MEASURING RADIATION & OPEN SOURCE SHARING of those measurements on an “as is” basis.

How safe you are, and how safe you want to be, is up to yourself to decide based on the raw data available.

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 »

New Map on Safecast.org

June 23, 2011 15:47 June 23, 2011 15:47 June 23, 2011 15:47
 

It should be no surprise that we think about maps a lot here at Safecast. In fact, it’s probably one of the most frequent topics of conversation. Especially maps with a lot of data and especially making that data understandable. But more than understandable, it needs to be useful. Understanding what data a map is showing you is one thing, understanding what that data means is a whole other story. We noticed this again and again when talking about radiation mapping, even when we can get the data and put it together on a map, we still get asked “ok, so what does that mean? Am I safe?” Not an easy question to answer. Earlier this month we were talking about this and about how radiation is such a scary thing – seeing red on a map can make people panic. And maybe it should, but when you are just showing a spectrum it’s common to use green on one end and red on another so perhaps that isn’t the best way to convey this. So we started thinking.

gridRadiation is a very scary and foreign thing to talk about because it’s invisible and most people aren’t familiar with what measurements and doses even mean. We started thinking about how to put that in a context that with which people are more familiar. Lets talk about weather, temperature specifically. If you and I both know what the weather was like yesterday, and you ask me what it’s like today and I say it’s hotter – you instantly know what I mean. What if we could do that with radiation as well? On March 10th, before the earth quake, before the tsunami, before the meltdowns – no one was worried about radiation. Or at least, not worried about it being more than usual. So if we use that as a base line, and say radiation levels are either lower or equal to what they were on March 10th, or higher than they were on March 10th. That turns out to actually be useful info. So we started sketching out how a map showing that might look. The simple mock up on the upper left was the first concept art for that. There is no real data there, that is just a mock up image of an idea. White squares are unmapped, green squares represent that we’ve taken a reading that is the same or lower, black squares indicated readings with elevated levels. We’ve spent the last few weeks trying to figure out how to turn that into a reality.

safecastToday we launched the first version on our front page. It doesn’t do everything we want it to yet, but it’s a start. One of the main questions is what would that baseline be? That’s a difficult question because prior to this event there wasn’t a lot of data available. For now we’re using 35 CPM, that may change. We also want to allow you (the viewer) to change that and decide what you think the baseline should be. We also want to give you more data for each of those squares – how many elevated readings for example. We also want you to be able to zoom in and see a similar level of granularity along the way. But this is a first step and we’re really excited about the direction. We’d love to hear your feedback on it as well.

Another thing you may notice on the front page now is more attention to the drive maps and our new (and growing) static sensor network. These are going to be incredibly useful going forward for keeping track of levels and seeing changes.

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