Saturday, June 18, 2011

Japanese People develop their own citizen radiation map

The distrust in the authorities has become so big that Japanese have developed their own citizen-made radiation map. Here there is a snapshot:

Everything redder than plain blue is above legal limits
The legal limit for civilians is 1 mSv/year, what translates as 0.114 micro-Sieverts/hour. This implies that all but the plainest blue is above legal limits and hence anomalously dangerous. Green colors already mean 6 or 7 times the legal limit, while orange is at least 20 times the legal limit and red is more than 45 times that legal limit. I would say that even cyan colors are flirting with unnecessary danger, specially if you live there for long or you have children with you. 

This data does not include possible internal sources of radiation such as those derived from ingesting products grown in affected areas. It is the internal emitters which are the most dangerous because you cannot move away from them once they are inside your body, guaranteeing a 24/7 exposure to radiation from inside. 

Recently it was reported that many children from Koriyama (economic hub of Fukushima prefecture) suffered from nosebleeds, diarrhea and lack of energy since the accident. Effectively Koriyama is heavily exposed to radiation from Fukushima II NPP: it is the yellow-green clump just West of the destroyed reactors. Fukushima city, the administrative head of the prefecture is the similarly yellowish clump North of it.

Both cities and maybe all the prefecture should be evacuated of at least children and pregnant women. However the government has limited the evacuation zone to the concentric rings of 20 and 30 km radius around the destroyed nuclear plant. Eventually they also decided to evacuate some villages in the "red" area out of the ridiculously small evacuation zone but that's about it.

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