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

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 seminar in Iwaki

March 7, 2012 13:59 March 7, 2012 13:59 March 7, 2012 13:59
 

This is a guest post written by Ryuichi Mori, ex vice chairman of Dentsu and Advisor to MIT media lab.

On March 1, I was invited by Pieter and Joe of Safecast Japan to convene a radiation seminar in the City of Iwaki, Fukushima. The tsunami all but wiped out Fukushima Prefecture’s fishing industry. The nuclear accidents added further insult to injury. Fukushima’s fish markets have been effectively obliterated. Radiation levels in the area make recovery all the more difficult, and the fishermen continue to spend their days in port rather than out at sea.

Here is the situation that Fukushima is facing. Continue reading »

  • March 7, 2012 13:59
  • Posted by sean on March 7, 2012 13:59
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  •   論説

WE ARE ALL RADIOACTIVE

March 7, 2012 13:43 March 7, 2012 13:43 March 7, 2012 13:43
 

Safecast friends Lisa Katayama and Jason Wishnow are working on a very cool film project called We Are All Radioactive about a group of surfers working to rebuild their towns in northern Japan after the 3/11 earthquake. They are raising funds on indiegogo right now. Safecast will play a part in some of the episodes and we’re excited to see the results from these hyper creative folks!

  • March 7, 2012 13:43
  • Posted by sean on March 7, 2012 13:43
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  •   ニュース

We are now @Safecast on twitter

March 4, 2012 22:43 March 4, 2012 22:43 March 4, 2012 22:43
 

Thanks to the help of the great people at twitter, we’ve secured the username @safecast and will no longer be using @safecastdotorg

  • March 4, 2012 22:43
  • Posted by sean on March 4, 2012 22:43
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  •   ニュース

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

Fukushima Geiger Counter

February 15, 2012 15:28 February 15, 2012 15:28 February 15, 2012 15:28
 

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 Munakata 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-20 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.

  • February 15, 2012 15:28
  • Posted by sean on February 15, 2012 15:28
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Pamphlet Explaining Safecast Mission and Activities (Japanese)

February 13, 2012 06:02 February 13, 2012 06:02 February 13, 2012 06:02
 

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!

Safecast Pamphlet

Update from WKO

February 5, 2012 18:39 February 5, 2012 18:39 February 5, 2012 18:39
 

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!

We need a volunteer to help with our volunteers

February 5, 2012 16:24 February 5, 2012 16:24 February 5, 2012 16:24
 

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 )

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 »

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