I'm not sure how it came to this - I'm really outside my comfort zone.

I enjoy going camping in australia, particularly within a days drive from home. But the rest of the time, I'm quite happy to stay at home. The first time I'd been overseas was only two years ago - we took the ferry to tasmania for a month. I was seasick. Both ways.

Occasionally I have been invited interstate for a meeting here or a party there, and usually I don't think twice before declining. I'm just happier staying close to home, my beautiful wife, and our kids. I'm usually much more interested with what's going down locally than anywhere else. Sure, I'm getting a little crusty. I'm at peace with that.

But there was something about the invitation to visit a recent reactor disaster zone that just gripped me. Tight. I've been tussling with local uranium issues since I came up to Darwin for the Jabiluka blockade in '98, and I remember the way news of Chernobyl filtered into my sheltered teenage awareness. After contemplating the risk of catastrophic reactor failure for so many years, now that it had happened I found myself wanting to reach out to the communities grappling with their new realities. Before I knew it, I found myself locked into a commitment to visit Fukushima.

My stomach was tight as I contemplated the discomfort of not just a foreign language, but hieroglyphic squiggles. Dense population. Cold winter. Long hours of work. Air travel. These all added up to a much greater weight of dread than the obvious radiological factors.

Radiation exposure is a calculated risk I've taken many times before at various hazards around Australia. Sure, I know, there's no safe dose, and every little bit adds up, but I'm a 40 yr old man; I've had my kids, so the greatest biological risk, that of tetragenic mutations leading to defects in future generations, doesn't apply to me. I knew I wouldn't get inside the exclusion zone, and If I die in 20 years from the increased risk of cancer that a day's dose at the new "acceptable" limits set by the Japanese government, that's my time. I'll avoid any dust and won't eat local mushrooms.

And just to be safe, I'll borrow Strider's geiger counter. That way, if I wind up somewhere hot, I'll be warned to move away.

Strider's geiger counter

Strider got a geiger counter a couple of years before the disaster. And it's lucky he did: ever since 3/11, they've been hard to come by. He bought it on ebay. Or at least, he gave me cash and I bought it for him. He specified the one with a vu meter and an audible click. AFAIK, it hasn't been calibrated since it arrived. He uses it mostly for demonstration purposes, coupled with a rock in a sock - uranium bearing material sourced just down the road from what was once what he refers to as 'the family uranium mine' - but that's another story.

Point is, it doesn't give what I would consider a reliable reading. Or rather, I don't quite understand how the level meter peak on each click translates to a micro-sievert per hour value. I'm pretty sure it's not directly comparable; it doesn't cache, so it's practically impossible to read at any precision; and he's told me before that it has sometimes behaved strangely. (Remember these defects, as I might refer to them later). But for my purposes, it's better than a stick, let alone a poke in the eye with one. I trust it to be a decent enough tool to allow me to compare one spot to another, and thereby know if and when I want to move away.

I've used it before. Not long after the NT government made the sensible move of temporarily closing Rum Jungle Lake when they recognised an increasing likelihood of risk to public safety, I took the strider counter down for a once over. Though the counter clicked faster than it does on the natural background radiation detectable in my home in Darwin, it wasn't as high as some of the bad points around the nearby contaminated arm of the Finnis River. At home, the counter gave a few clicks a minute. Round Rum Jungle, it gave about 12. The vu meter never got over the 2 uSv level at the river, and at the Lake it was little over 1. Clearly Rum Jungle displays higher radioactivity than the city; just how high isn't very clear with this device.

contaminant salts leaching from abandoned waste piles at Rum Jungle.

 

Dosing Tokyo

The air travel was as bad as expected. After getting through customs, on a few trains then finally on to a street, I quickly whipped out the strider counter to get a reading. Call me twisted, but after hearing stories of cesium hotspots in Tokyo, I was almost disappointed when it clicked no harder or faster than back in Darwin. I packed it away, and forgot about it for 24 hrs.

Fukushima City

The next night, I exited the railway station in the centre of Fukushima city. Pretty unimpressed to be greeted by snow. I saw snow once before, and decided I didn't need to again. Plus, this time I'd forgotten my gloves. So I raced to the warmth of the hotel. Only it wasn't warm, it was hot. You know how each year more and more of Darwin gets airconditioned to an unnaturally almost unbearably cold artificial climate, that can then only make it harder to return to reality? In Japan, they seem to have the reverse problem of heating indoor spaces way more than is comfortable, let alone necessary. Once settled, I started to feel curious about taking another measurement.

 

So I rugged up, and headed back to the railway station. As soon as I started, it was clear that things were hotter here than Tokyo. Occasionally the clicks were came together so fast they were trilling, so that I couldn't distinguish each one. I decided that when clicks ran into a blur, I'd count it as three. I counted this way over 60 seconds, and measured 81 clicks - around seven times as fast as the highest count I'd made at Rum Jungle, and the vu meter hitting over the 1 uSv mark.

I took a second reading here, and got a count of 80 cpm and similar levels. I then went around the corner and took a reading on the snow- capped foot path (a phenonenom I don't really approve of) and got a count of 78 cpm. Cold enough, I decided I was satisfied.

Driving towards the reactors

Next day, I was on a coach heading towards the reactors. Of course, we weren't gonna reach them, but I was keen to know how high the readings would go.

Once again, I realised something dark within myself, when I recognised a sense of disappointment that the click rate went down almost immediately to levels comparable to Rum Jungle. Slightly higher when we got off the bus again in 15 minutes, but certainly below a quarter of the frequency of clicks I'd heard in the city. I'm pretty sure an accurate reading here would be higher than one at Rum Jungle Lake, but that's my best reference, and the deficiencies of this tool are such that the difference in readings appears slight.

It wasn't until some time later, as we left the suburbs and encountered some forested mountain edges that the click rate started to climb. At one point the counter started clicking too fast to even estimate: certainly well over 200 cpm, quite possibly double that, with the vu meter reliably hitting the 3uSv mark - and this is inside a bus. This time, there was no kidding around. This was clicking 20, maybe 40 or more times faster than anywhere at Rum Jungle, and the meter was going much higher. I made a sound recording to refer back to later in case I can make a better count by slowing the playback.

I was reassured: my dark side's not so strong. This was already enough to make me begin hoping it would soon go down - which it did. As the forest edges along the roadside thinned, the clicks slowed back towards the previous rates, around 20 clicks per minute and rarely hitting over the 1uSv mark. Higher in the bus than out in the open at Rum Jungle, but not overly so.

Checkpoint Farley

Knowing we wouldn't be allowed through, we stopped at a roadblock at the exclusion zone boundary, and stepped out to soak up the vibe.

Here at the road block, the strider counter was reading not much higher than it did at Rum Jungle, and running just a bit faster.

Once again, don't get me rong, I'm convinced by more reliable measurements that it's more radioactive here than at RJ, but the counter wasn't making a great deal out of that difference. If you were to test the government evacuation measures purely on the basis of the conformance of radiation levels at the boundary with their up-sized 'acceptable' limits, you could kid yourself it all made sense. But measure in the city, or some of the forest in between the two, and you may see otherwise.

I made similar readings on the way home, and upon return to Fukushima station. Someone else later reported that their device gave it's highest reading on the station platform! (but I'm not sure where else they measured). The readings on the way back at night seemed a bit slower and lower, but the different sites were in similar proportion.

Caveat

please don't interpret my report as anything even remotely like 'evidence'. I think it's an interesting indication, and it certainly suggests to me that the issues in the city are more serious than the government is willing to acknowledge. And there are certainly radiation hotspots outside the exclusion zone, as pointed out by individuals in locations inadequately supported for evacuation. This indication is consistent with other reports and ad-hoc measurements. But you wouldn't make any decisions on the basis of these alone, when detailed and concerted measurement and ongoing monitoring is such a practical option. If governments won't step up to this fundamental responsibility, then perhaps communities can be empowered to do it themselves. see: safecast.org

On top of that, I'm not qualified or trained, plus I may have lost a significant portion of intelligence and consciousness to the uncommon cold.

Also, just to be clear: upon re-reading, it occurred to me that it sounds as though the snow is radioactive. Of course it's not: it just happens that where the snow is left fallen tends to be the same places where radioactive contaminants have collected and not been dispersed: eg. in garden beds.

Addendum

On the way to tokyo on the train, I dropped my bag and broke the GM tube. If you're reading this and you think you should break the bad news to strider, please don't. If you're reading this and you are Strider, then please go back to the paragraph that highlights the deficiencies of your old device, and wait patiently for me to source you a superior replacement.

 

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* the Japanese government declared that a dose of 20 mSv per year is safe. That is the highest dose allowed to any nuclear industry worker in Australia. Most uranium miners are required to get no more than 5. I can understand proposing 20 as an acceptable limit - in the face of a compounded disaster like this, governments have to make some really ugly and unenviable decisions. But acceptable is not 'safe'. I reckon that calling this high level 'safe' is deliberately misleading, and it mitigates against families and communities taking appropriate precautions and making the best possible decisions.