Friday, March 16, 2012

Professor Yukio Hayakawa Takes a Walk in Fukushima City, 3/16/2012

armed with 4 different radiation survey meters. One of the reasons he went to Fukushima was apparently to test the survey meters and compare the readings. The entire walk took 7 hours yesterday, says Hayakawa in his tweet, nothing compared to mountain climbing. (He's a volcanologist.)

4.164 microsieverts/hour on the "black dust" - roadside sediment of soil and organic materials. (It is not just in Minami Soma City, where the highest radioactive cesium density in the "black dust" so far is 3.43 million becquerels/kg.)

Over 10 microsieverts/hour (all his survey meters went overscale) at the rain gutter.

2.3 microsieverts/hour on the lawn in front of the City Hall, 1.5 microsievert/hour 1 meter off the lawn.

For detailed locations and measurements, see his blog post (in Japanese).

Fukushima City at EveryTrail

7 comments:

Chibaguy said...

Looks like the tunnels on the Shinkansen were not compromised. That is a lot of gamma radiation penetrating the train.

Anonymous said...

It blows my mind that the government refuses to evacuate people from Fukushima, Nihonmatsu, and Koriyama.

Anonymous said...

Just too expensive and would cause "panic"..and "baseless rumors." When a government equates human life to a physical value, dollar or yen or ?, its no longer "government"--its murder.

Vic Cebollero said...

It would be helpful if you posted the normal range next to the current range so we can quickly assess the danger. Three million becquerels relative to what? Thank you for posting these important messages. Blessed be --- Vic

lance2727 said...

question? how many japanese comming to the states? if its' not so bad why the movement? ask the questions find the answers:)

arevamirpal::laprimavera said...

@Vic Cebollero, the pre-Fukushima radioactivity of soil in Fukushima was mostly less than 20 becquerels/kg of radioactive cesium 137, from the past nuclear fallout.

Anonymous said...

Excuse me Vic Cebollaro, but Bequerel in itself is an *absolute* measure, as opposed to, let's say for example, degree celsius which measure the temperature as a difference relative to to the ice point of water. 1 Bq (one becquerel) means litterally "one disntegration per second".
This said, it'is certainly useful to have a term of comparison with "natural" (more or less) levels of radiation (let's not forget that the so called "background" level in japan is mainly a "gift" from WWII), but when we come to talk about *millions* of bequerels then it's really hard to think of any "natural" source of such a contamination.

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