Monday, April 9, 2012

Professor Yukio Hayakawa Takes a "Radioactive Walk" in Edogawa-ku, Tokyo (4/9/2012)

Edogawa-ku is one of the 23 Special Wards (ku) of Tokyo, situated in the eastern-most Tokyo right next to Chiba. The eastern Wards of Tokyo, including Edogawa, Katsushika, Adachi have elevated radiation levels compared to the western Tokyo.

Professor Hayakawa walked from the southern tip of Edogawa (Kasai Seaside Park) to Shinkoiwa JR Station. Along the way, he measured "black dust" (dark sediment) at two locations, and one of them (in Kasai Seaside Park) measured 1.385 microsievert/hour on his survey meter.

He also used a stick-type cheap survey meter called "Air Counter" (aka "Ea-bo" エア棒), which seems to measure pretty well if the radiation level is above 0.1 microsievert/hour.

江戸川区


EveryTrail - Find hiking trails in California and beyond

Right now, Professor Hayakawa is walking somewhere in Koriyama City, Fukushima Prefecture with his survey meter. Soon it will be on the Everytrail map he will create.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

For a good understanding of what effects radiation has on the body have a look at this Helen Caldicott lecture , its nearly an hour long but worth watching

http://archive.org/details/scm-30754-drhelencaldicottwhatwelearnedf

.cheers

Anonymous said...

My understanding has been that you shouldn't put Geiger counters on direct contact with the surfaces and then take the Sievert number on face value as a conversion factor applies that is not accurate for direct surface readings. He should measure at 50cm or 1m like many other people, so we can compare figures.

Of course numbers will be smaller then. I used to get over 3 microSv, sometimes over 5, and the air radiation @1m was "only" 0.6. Naturally, I got more attention from people with the higher numbers.

Anonymous said...

stay away from black dust and you will be OK

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