Rad Porn and other radiation devices

[Yokohammer]

I get all my veggies from my Rice Ranch in Shikoku

Then it might pay you to take a funky 60,000 yen Geiger counter down to your rice ranch in Shikoku. If you find no ground contamination anywhere you'll know your veggies (and rice, I assume, its being a rice ranch and all) are safe. Of course it's probably safe to assume that a rice ranch in Shikoku is safe anyway, but suppose your rice ranch was in Saitama, or Ibaraki, or Fukushima, or Miyagi ... etc. That funky 60,000 yen Geiger counter would be a helluva good investment.

Now as for butter and milk, like I said: "very expensive laboratory equipment." Unless you can hook up with a dairy farmer that you know is in a safe area (your funky 60,000 Geiger counter can help you with that) and source your dairy produce exclusively from that farmer, then you're going to have to trust something.

[Yokohammer]

As for geiger counters, they need to be lab checked and calibrated against a known radioactive source in order to give meaningful measurements:

Like it or not, measuring radioactive decay is a science.

Which is another reason I chose the ECOTEST model. It's calibrated, it is CE certified, the company is ISO 9001 - 2000 certified, they have been in the business for many years, the Ukraine government uses their radiation detection products ... .

They have the best qualifications I could find.

It's like buying any tool. Do the research, don't buy a useless piece of shit, and then learn to use it properly.

[Russell]

However! One thing that the TERRA-P+ can do that most of the other personal Geiger counter thingies cannot do (and one of the many reasons I chose it) is measure beta-particle flux density, so it can do a very basic check on foods

I guess that the beta-particle flux density is the number of beta-particles that pass through a certain surface area (correct me if I am wrong). But how can this help to do a check on food? What is the exact procedure to do a check on food using this particular functionality of your dosimeter?

[Kanchou]

That would be over 500 milisieverts per year... that's... pretty unsafe.

We've got a gieger counter at my school here. It varies between 0.12 to 0.16. Basically normal.

[Yokohammer]

That would be over 500 milisieverts per year... that's... pretty unsafe.

We've got a gieger counter at my school here. It varies between 0.12 to 0.16. Basically normal.

Yes, 0.12 to 0.16 µSv/h is a pretty normal reading.

Where did you get the 500 mSv/year?

[Yokohammer]

I guess that the beta-particle flux density is the number of beta-particles that pass through a certain surface area (correct me if I am wrong). But how can this help to do a check on food? What is the exact procedure to do a check on food using this particular functionality of your dosimeter?

OK, here's how it works:

First you measure the gamma background in the normal way. You need to wait for 60~70 seconds until averaging is finished and you get a stable reading.

Then you switch to the surface beta flux density mode, remove the filter covering the GM tube, and place the exposed GM tube as close as possible to the surface to be measured (the surface of the food in this case), keeping it parallel to the surface.

The device automatically subtracts the gamma background reading and displays the beta flux density in particles (cm2*min).

Ta-daa ... all done.

This is not going to be super-accurate though. There are too many variables. But it'll give you an idea.

[Kanchou]

Microsieverts per hour X 24 X 365, divide by 1000. Actually it was almost 600.

[Yokohammer]

Microsieverts per hour X 24 X 365, divide by 1000. Actually it was almost 600.

Oh OK, you're talking about Mrs. Okoshi's 67 µSv/h reading.
Yeah, that's really high.

[Russell]

OK, here's how it works:

First you measure the gamma background in the normal way. You need to wait for 60~70 seconds until averaging is finished and you get a stable reading.

Then you switch to the surface beta flux density mode, remove the filter covering the GM tube, and place the exposed GM tube as close as possible to the surface to be measured (the surface of the food in this case), keeping it parallel to the surface.

The device automatically subtracts the gamma background reading and displays the beta flux density in particles (cm2*min).

Ta-daa ... all done.

This is not going to be super-accurate though. There are too many variables. But it'll give you an idea.

Thanks! Is there a recommended time that you have to put your GM tube near to the food source? Or will the reading on your meter automatically become more accurate the more time passes? I ask this because some sources on the Internet suggest a period of 12 hours.

If your dosimeter requires a couple of minutes you might be able to detect the food that is badly contaminated by radiation, which is maybe fine in a sense. I hope it doesn't get to that point, though, and that radiation levels stay lower. But even then I continue to be scared to eat out in restaurants, because I do not know where they get their ingredients. Low levels of radiation may still be dangerous when ingested. That's why people do not eat smoke detectors (well there is another reason too).

[damn name]

I don't think she's going to sit in that sewer 24 hours a day, seven days a week for a year.

[Coligny]

I don't think she's going to sit in that sewer 24 hours a day, seven days a week for a year.

Thanks for missing the point...

[damn name]

Why don't you explain the point.

[Yokohammer]

Why don't you explain the point.

Perhaps I can supply at least part of the answer to that.

I think the point is that the radiation in the sewage ditch had to come from somewhere, and the fact that it's a sewage ditch means that by definition it's going somewhere as well. That's a lot of radioactivity to be randomly flowing around. Where did it come from, and where is it going to end up?

What would you do if you found radiation levels that high on your own property? Ignore it because you don't spend your days lying in the ditch? I doubt it. Assuming that the NYT haven't left out a decimal point and the radiation level that Mrs. Okoshi measured was really 67 µSv/h (and not 0.67 µSv/h), there is a very real problem. Since she's in Iwaki, not far from the nuke plant, that value could very well be correct. Even if it's off by 10% or so, you're still not going to want that level of radioactivity anywhere near where you live or where your food is grown.

If it's not in an area that has been evacuated, that ditch and anywhere around it that shows radiation levels that high will have to be decontaminated, and the sludge and topsoil that is removed will have to be buried or stored appropriately (of course it can't be buried where it might affect the groundwater ... which would be just about everywhere).

I'm pretty sure that if you were in Mrs. Okoshi's shoes you'd be very worried, and probably hightailing it out of town ASAP.

[Coligny]

Why don't you explain the point.

I'm no longer as playfull as Yokohamer, beside you can't bring fanaticals to think... that's why they are considered fanatical...

Is your real name Mendez ?

Do you know these guys ? are you related ?

[damn name]

No doubt, Yokohammer, that that contamination needs to be cleaned up. Sewers are by definition collection areas for runoff and they are natural places to find higher contamination.

No one would lie in that sewer for a year straight, so the exercise of totaling the exposure for a year at that hourly rate, then saying that value is dangerous, is meaningless. Of course that value is dangerous, but no one is going to be exposed that amount. That was my (obvious) point.

I wonder what the status is now? I would say the odds are good that it was cleaned up by now. Too bad that the NYT will never do a follow up to see if it was done.

You seem like a mature reasonable guy, so you know that a first call to a shiakusho about something like this is going to result in some confusion by whomever answers the phone.

After some questions and shuffling around, I would suspect that someone got back to her and it's been dealt with. It wasn't a 3-alarm fire or an EMERGENCY! ! ! OMG OMG! (as excitable young Coligny would love it to be). That level of contamination should be addressed, but no one is going to die from it.

I don't have any issues at all with people tracking or measuring radiation in that area. It think it's reasonable. But multiplying 24 x 365 to an outdoor reading like that is, well, ignorance.

[matsuki]

[quote="damn name"]No doubt, Yokohammer, that that contamination needs to be cleaned up. Sewers are by definition collection areas for runoff and they are natural places to find higher contamination.

No one would lie in that sewer for a year straight, so the exercise of totaling the exposure for a year at that hourly rate, then saying that value is dangerous, is meaningless. Of course that value is dangerous, but no one is going to be exposed that amount. That was my (obvious) point.

I wonder what the status is now? I would say the odds are good that it was cleaned up by now. Too bad that the NYT will never do a follow up to see if it was done.

You seem like a mature reasonable guy, so you know that a first call to a shiakusho about something like this is going to result in some confusion by whomever answers the phone.

After some questions and shuffling around, I would suspect that someone got back to her and it's been dealt with. It wasn't a 3-alarm fire or an EMERGENCY! ! ! OMG OMG! (as excitable young Coligny would love it to be). That level of contamination should be addressed, but no one is going to die from it.

I don't have any issues at all with people tracking or measuring radiation in that area. It think it's reasonable. But multiplying 24 x 365 to an outdoor reading like that is, well, ignorance. ]

The whole point is it should be the government, not private citizens, finding/reporting/cleaning up these hotspots. The gov. reaction (or lack of) is appalling....

[Coligny]

After some questions and shuffling around, I would suspect that someone got back to her and it's been dealt

that's quite some whishfull thinking

with. It wasn't a 3-alarm fire or an EMERGENCY! ! ! OMG OMG! (as excitable young Coligny would love it to be). That level of contamination should be addressed

1- no shit sherlock 2- it's not even recorded until an obaachan buy her own device, you really think someone in charge is going to give a fuck until somebody put a gun on his forehead ?

, but no one is going to die from it.

so you say... and the other nukapologist have been spewting the same bullshit all over, just because most of the radiation won't kill you on the spot, then it's ok, no need to worry aboot it... I'm pretty sure you have nothing against asbestos and lead paint either...

You are the exact kind of droid that only makes matter worse by not understanding that in case of unknown extend you assume the worst first and then throttle back as needed. You are the same useless know-it-all as the Tepco and J-Gov, who actually do as little as possible, then try to hide, then have to throttle up the response to cover the initial accident plus the added damage brought by their initial underwhelming response.
You have no place in this conversation for 2 reason, first by your lack of common senses, lack of understanding of crisis response protocols then for the simple reason that this thread is aboot people trying to measure how to do it as best as possible according to means and see what it's really all aboot. You come just to say "it's A SCIENCE... you can't do it properly" and "THERE IS NO RISK ANYWAY, THOSE WHO THINK THERE ARE RISK ARE JUST PANICKING !!!!!"

I don't have any issues at all with people tracking or measuring radiation in that area. It think it's reasonable. But multiplying 24 x 365 to an outdoor reading like that is, well, ignorance.

That's why you consider it a worst case scenario and according to your possibilities act in response to its specificities.

If in the sewer it's that bad, the stuff come from somewhere. Before going to said sewer you can assume that you might be exposed to it, as well as indoor where radiation tends to accumulate.

So at worst we got :

Microsieverts per hour X 24 X 365, divide by 1000. Actually it was almost 600.

[damn name]

The whole point is it should be the government, not private citizens, finding/reporting/cleaning up these hotspots. The gov. reaction (or lack of) is appalling....

I don't have the power to control what governments do, so I don't rail at the wind.

My point was that expanding an hourly reading to 24 hours per day x 365 days per year to reach a dosage is an unrealistic reach.

[Yokohammer]

I don't have the power to control what governments do, so I don't rail at the wind.

My point was that expanding an hourly reading to 24 hours per day x 365 days per year to reach a dosage is an unrealistic reach.

OK, let's divide the figure in question by, say, 10.

The result is 58.6 mSv (thats millisieverts) per year, which is still way too high.

The maximum annual dose allowed for radiation workers is 20 mSv per year.

So I think what people are saying is that, sure, we realize that nobody is going to lie in that ditch day and night actually accumulating 586 mSv over the course of a year, but that's the figure we use to make reasoned judgements about the situation because there's no practical way of knowing exactly how many hours someone would actually be exposed. If we have the full yearly figure it's easy enough to do what I did above, dividing it by half, or a quarter, or a tenth, to get an idea of what the actual exposure might be. In this case it's immediately obvious that 586 mSv/year is just too fuggin' high, no matter how you divide it.

But also, as has been pointed out, we don't know where that radiation is coming from, so that ditch might not be (probably isn't) the only place where radiation levels are unacceptably high. It's probably wise to assume that actual exposure in the area is higher than you might think.

I think that starting with a yearly value is a perfectly reasonable way to approach the problem. If we can all agree to share that understanding we can go on to ... whatever come next!

[Coligny]

My point was that expanding an hourly reading to 24 hours per day x 365 days per year to reach a dosage is an unrealistic reach.

Sophism here, but, you can at most call it "probably excessive" or more preciselty "absolute maximum".
But to call it unrealistic is discarding reality when you are just facing it... as of now, if the level don't change, this calculation is correct.

You can only assume that it will go down... maybe... but the same way if it get worse again tomorrow it can also goes up. With your traditionnal bias you will of course say that the values are not lethal, not important, will go down anyway from their previous already benign level. But that's not the point, the point is, at this cumulative place, the level are high, this radioactivity don't come magically out of the sewer, it is just collected by the sewer, that means that either in the dust or in the water system (or, or, or) there is important amount of radioactivity present. You are blindly and ridiculously focusing on defending the non lethality of the sewer sludge, while totally ignoring that in fact, nobody gives a flying fuck if the sewer glows in the dark. The problem is where this glowiness come from before settling in the sewers. To make it simple... in order to shit rainbows, you have to eat skittles first...

[damn name]

Radiation decreases by the inverse-square rule. Sorry, but even 10% is completely unrealistic. Eight hours per day for over 100 days lying in a sewer? I don't think so.

The danger of bacterial infection is far more dangerous.

It might even be cleaned out by now? That would really freak Coligny out. He'd be devastated. I'm going to do a little follow up on this and see if I can find out the status now.

[Russell]

[quote="damn name"]Radiation decreases by the inverse-square rule. Sorry, but even 10% is completely unrealistic. Eight hours per day for over 100 days lying in a sewer? I don't think so. ]
Basically you are right, but now imagine that the sludge from the sewer is used to produce cement or gardening soil. And now imagine that someone grows some veggies in that soil. And then imagine that these veggies are consumed.

The inverse-square rule works two ways: if the distance is small, you get a high radiation flux, and this is why ingesting radioactive matter is so dangerous.

These high readings that this lady got are not very reassuring, since no one knows where else one will find similar readings. In someone's vegetable garden? At a children's play ground? In a fishing pond?

It is not necessary to be alarmed, but it is certainly necessary to be careful.

[Yokohammer]

Radiation decreases by the inverse-square rule. Sorry, but even 10% is completely unrealistic. Eight hours per day for over 100 days lying in a sewer? I don't think so. ]
Now you're assuming that Mrs. Okoshi measured radiation in the ditch by getting in the ditch and putting the counter right up against the sludge, or whatever was in it. I think that's unrealistic. It's much more likely that she simply stood near the ditch while holding the counter in her hand at a level where she could easily read it. So the inverse-square law goes out the window there. The radiation she measured was most likely what you'd be directly exposed to while standing near or walking by the ditch.

It might even be cleaned out by now? That would really freak Coligny out. He'd be devastated. I'm going to do a little follow up on this and see if I can find out the status now.

I certainly hope it has been cleaned up, and I'll be interested to hear if you can find out anything more about the story ... but (and sorry about this) ... even if it has been cleaned up that doesn't make everything OK, and it's still not really the point. There should be no need to clean up radioactive crud from anywhere.

What we're discussing here, at least as I see it, is what sort of radiation levels are resulting from the Fukushima disaster, how the radiation is distributed, where you're likely to find hot spots, how to interpret whatever information we can gather, whether there is a health threat worth worrying about ... etc. There would be no need to discuss this if we could simply believe whatever TEPCO and the government are telling us, but it's pretty clear that we can't. I don't for a moment believe they're trying to cause harm, but I do think they're focusing on the wrong issues and being somewhat negligent as a result.

There's a heck of a lot that we need to figure out for ourselves, and that's what we're trying to do. At least I am.

[Coligny]

[quote="damn name"]Radiation decreases by the inverse-square rule. Sorry, but even 10% is completely unrealistic. Eight hours per day for over 100 days lying in a sewer? I don't think so. ]
You don't have problem with echo with your head so far up your ass ?

/sidenote, i'm over and done with your crap. /ignorelist

[Yokohammer]

[Taro Toporific]

[Yokohammer]

I finished my "lab rat" days [color="Silver"](as GomiGirl refers to them)[/color] in the university as a lab manager in the department of Radiation Biology. All of my Phd. housemates/coworkers refused jobs as a Mission Specialists on the Space Shuttle because it that job was waaaay over 10 mSv/year---If you can see radiation scintillation when your eyes are closed and you are trying go to sleep as the folks who worked on the Space Suttle report, the rads are too high.

Hey, that is a cool story!

Apparently astronuts really get hit hard. From what I've been reading even regular airline pilots often get more than radiation workers (well, maybe not more than the guys working at Fukushima at the moment). I guess they deserve to get paid well.

[Yokohammer]

Been doing a few more measurements around the house, and just checked the drainage channel in the street as well as the ground around the exit pipe from the roof gutter. As expected, the figures are a bit high.

* Above the soil in the garden: 0.23 µSv/h (no change – same as previous readings).

* 50cm above the street drainage channel: 0.35 µSv/h.

* 50cm above the ground at the exit from the roof gutter: 0.42 µSv/h.

So it seems that radiation really does concentrate in spots like that. That last reading is too high, although it's still only equivalent to 3.67 mSv/year. Can't help wondering what it might have been shortly after the hydrogen explosions at the plant.

Worth keeping an eye on.

[Yokohammer]

Just on the noon news: the Ukraine Ambassador to Japan has just delivered a load of dosimeters and survey meters to Fukushima prefecture, to be distributed to schools and city authorities etc. as the city sees fit. If I caught the figures correctly, it was about 1,000 dosimeters and 1,000 survey meters. That's a lot of rad gear! All for free, of course.

And ... oh yeah ... you might have already guessed, but the devices are from the ECOTEST company. How 'bout that.

[matsuki]

Just on the noon news: the Ukraine Ambassador to Japan has just delivered a load of dosimeters and survey meters to Fukushima prefecture, to be distributed to schools and city authorities etc. as the city sees fit. If I caught the figures correctly, it was about 1,000 dosimeters and 1,000 survey meters. That's a lot of rad gear! All for free, of course.

And ... oh yeah ... you might have already guessed, but the devices are from the ECOTEST company. How 'bout that.

Good thing they went directly to Fukushima...if the federal gov. got their hands on them, they would have never made it there. Just wait though...the government will start trying to brush aside the readings as mistakes by amateurs with poorly made foreign measuring devices.