Radiation Monitoring Part III

100 Sieverts/HR in Fukushima No. 1 after April 8 7.1M aftershock. 

Fukushima is still today, a month after the Tsunami hit Japan, a bleeding scab of radiation on the face of the Earth. Millions of gallons of radioactive water have already been released into the sea, Readings as high as 1000s of micro Sieverts/Hour are routinely being reported by Tepco, and  picocuries of  radiation are showing up in the air, water, and  milk of the world.  60,000 tons of radioactive water still needs to be dumped into the Ocean. Two Japanese journalists took a makeshift tour of the evacuated zone with their Geiger counters. This is twelve minutes long:

Radiation Monitoring... Part II

Updates (4/2/2011)

• UW has published a paper on the magnitude of airborne fission products arriving from Fukushima (1)
• UC Berkeley Nuclear engineering department is now testing rain water and commercial milk supplies (1,2)
• Japan has apparently communicated to the DOE that two reactors have suffered partial meltdowns (1)
• There is discussion of localized and intermittent criticality inside the damaged reactors (1)
• "Film is Truth" in Bellingham, WA has in its catalog an informative, and touching 2007 film: 

  	Heavy Water
  	A film for Chernobyl Directed by David Bickerstaff and Phil Grabsky

Radiation Monitoring...

I have much I want to say about energy production and risk, but I don't have the time to say it all this week. It should be enough to say that the state of Washington and Northern Puget Sound have good reason to talk about BP's disastrous gulf oil spill and Japan's (and GE's) disastrous nuclear calamity and our new/old "War on Libya".

But for today, I am just presenting the statistical data I have gathered monitoring radiation in my office since March 15. Note that since I gather irregular periods, have the monitor located in my network closet, am not a physicist, have multiple layers of HVAC filtration, using a PC based Geiger counter, probably have lots of radon in my basement, etc...