Leading magazines started reporting the contamination in Tokyo.
From 'Aera' 11th of June
Ward/place Bq/kg
Kita 10,704
Kita 36,523
Kita 48,595
Kita 88,885
Bunkyou 47,808
Bunkyou 14,060
The University of Tokyo, Bunkyou 60,581
The University of Tokyo, Hospital, Bunkyou 52,007
The University of Tokyo, Yasuda Hall, Bunkyou 4,306
Chiyoda 25,159
Chiyoda 91,790
Imperial Palace, Chiyoda 77,547
Imperial Palace, Chiyoda 84,611
Imperial Palace, Chiyoda 34,667
Imperial Palace, Chiyoda 49,393
Minato 71,133
Okutama 16,825
50,000 Bq/kg is equivalent to 3,250,000 Bq/m2, falls on the red part below in Chernobyl.
Four months ago 20,000 Bq/kg was the highest.
These publishing Ca137 samplings, or just radiological activity? Be good to know what the pre-accident background radiation was for those areas. Were NYC Grand Central Station a nuke plant, they would shut it down - way to much uranium in the granite. Finding man-made material in Tokyo would be disquieting.
ReplyDeleteHow true are the official metrics, btw? Anyone getting calibrated secondary readings that are backing up the formal released data? I'd be wondering if the published numbers were low, if others are getting higher results.
Those surveys were conducted by groups such as city authorities, cooperatives, members of assembly at an official party and counters were not simple geiger, but expensive scintillation type.
ReplyDeleteBackground radiation was almost nothing in those area.
So suppose those figures were correct, what would they do next? No one can relocate 30 million people to somewhere outside Tokyo, so it seems they are waiting for people's willingness to move.
10,000 pCi/kg (370 Bq/kg) was the level the FDA said don't eat this. Got a pointer to the data? Wondering about the numbers. The isotopes matter, btw, as do when the measurements were taken. I-131 has a very short half life.
ReplyDeleteIt is worth comparing the numbers to Europe after Chernobyl. Germany and Sweden were not evacuated with similar numbers. (Forsmark, Sweeden was 120,000 Bq/m2) Also worth looking at the impact that it had on similar levels of contamination. That said, I might import my mushrooms from areas outside of the contamination zone.
http://www.davistownmuseum.org/cbm/Rad7.html
Anyhow... Chernobyl does provide some reasonable data points on the health side. Compare like radiological numbers, compare the mid term (26 years) of medical data. I want to say Fukushima released about a tenth of what Chernobyl did, so the European data, adjusted for distance, might be a reasonable approximation of Tokyo.