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Ask Slashdot: Radiation Detection For Tokyo Resident?
An anonymous reader writes "I'm an American who is living in Tokyo. Stories have started popping up about 'radiation hot spots' in Tokyo and surrounding prefectures so I have begun to worry. I live on the first floor of my apartment building and right by our washing machine there is a gutter out there that is clogged with rain water and mud, which has me especially worried because my wife and I are planning to have kids soon. Obviously no one from the government is going to come by to check our gutter so I feel the need to take matters into my own hands. I have absolutely no idea so I'm asking you guys. What kind of radiation detector should I get? A Geiger Counter? If it measures Gamma rays is that enough? Are alpha and beta dangerous too? I know no one has all the answers regarding radiation but any advice you guys could give me would be great."
Ask Slashdot anything you want! No need for prior research or common sense.
Even the Setagaya hotspot, caused by a forgotten stash of highly radioactive radium, which was orders of magnitude worse than anything else found in Tokyo, was nowhere near the point where it would have posed any danger to the people in the vicinity.
This is just not something which is worth worrying about, much less spending money on. Save your money for the thing your kid actually needs.
When they talk about "radiation hot spots", they're not talking about anything that will be a problem unless you're standing on it 24/7 for a decade or so.
But, to provide more detail, alpha isn't a problem unless you eat the emitter (or inhale it), beta isn't a problem unless the emitter is in contact with your bare skin, and gamma can be a problem, assuming you live next to it for a while....
If the muddy spot bothers you, hose it off.
And good luck with the kids....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Utter fearmongering nonsense. Neutrons occur naturally everywhere as secondary particles from cosmic rays.
Rather than geiger counter, there are plenty of electronic pocket dosimeters which can also show accumulated dose. Your main concern is measuring gamma. These dosimeters will run from $200 to $600 for a basic model. Some even can show dose rate graph over time. http://www.dosimeter.com/survey-meters/digilert-100-survey-meter/
Alright, why not advise that he BORROWS one from an organization then? Like from Safecast?
And what misunderstanding? Maybe he has a kid that likes to play and eat mud and he noticed the 57 microSv/hr hotspot in Kashiwa. Who knows wtf is going on around Tokyo, but woudn't a legitimate geek response be to scientifically test the area, just in case? Your response is either non-geek like (for a geek site) and/or just playing "nothing to see here, folks" shill-speak.
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
I do not have any information about place where you could borrow one, so I am unable to give any advice on that. What I said was, specifically, "Save your money".
I only just found out about the 57 microSv/h hotspot. That is indeed very interesting, but it is extremely unlikely to have anything to do with Fukushima, and sounds more like buried illegal radioactive waste, or maybe another forgotten stash of radioactive material that got buried by chance. That is something that could be found pretty much anywhere, and if you wouldn't worry about that living anywhere else, you shouldn't worry about it when living in Tokyo. The chances of encountering such a thing are quite minuscule.
Now, having citizens equipped with radiation monitors moving around measuring radiation is actually a very good idea, for exactly this reason: There is a lot of forgotten radioactive material around the world that it would be good to find, and lots of people moving doing lots of measurements helps with that. We saw this already with the Setagaya hotspot. However, this doesn't seem to be what the person asking the question is interested in. He just seems to want to measure radiation around his house, not over a larger area and not coordinated with others. This is basically useless.
yes you are right this "background" radiation does occur naturally and no your are wrong their is reason to fear as their is no known safe level of radiation.
Utter BULLSHIT..
There is NO LINK between cancer and radiation in humans at below 100mSv/yr acute radiation dosage or 400mSv/yr prolonged radiation dosage or 4000mSv/lifetime (you can't exceed either of the limits). Period.
And now you are trying to spin this into "there is no known safe level of radiation"??? Seriously. Get a life. Radiation is a *stressor* like 1000s of other things that are far more carcinogenic that you choose to expose yourself to. WTF do you think formaldehyde does to you? Or gasoline? Or submicron dust from car breaks on the street?? All of these are far more dangerous than radiation because these target specific areas of your body.
There is NO KNOWN TOTALLY SAFE LEVELS OF BREATHING OXYGEN. Oxygen is the strongest free radical creator in our body. Now go, and deal with it.
You sound like someone that can't understand that they do not live forever. Hell, I hope you do not drive or get out of the house as that is far more dangerous than if you didn't evacuate from Fukushima and and proceeded to lived 2km from the reactor for next 100 years. But I guess sometimes it is futile to explain magnitude of danger if people have preexisting dogma about something.
"There is no totally safe level of radiation" just like it is not totally safe sitting on your ass typing this up. Yeap, nothing is totally safe.... Geez!
I love technology of all kinds. I am also working on a graduate degree in health physics (radiation protection would be the more appropriate title, fyi). Frankly, assuming this isn't someone trolling slashdot, he really shouldn't bother. The fact that he had to ask if alpha radiation was a significant concern tells me he isn't even close to qualified to assess the risks a radioactive source poses.
Think of it this way.. If someone asked you "I want to write my own TV database scraper. What would the best type of programming language to learn be? Will I need a keyboard? Just fyi, I only have a small amount of time, as this isn't my career," what would your response be? The question he asked is on the same level. If you don't immediately recognize that, then you really have no business commenting on the subject. It would be like someone asking for the best statistical thermodynamics textbook, then making it apparent they didn't know basic algebra.
Ignoring for a second the obvious serious lack of knowledge, radiation monitoring equiptment of any quality is expensive and needs calibration. Which requires access to radioactive standard sources. A geiger counter tells you nothing, especially a crappy one. I have a natural uranium deposit not far from my home. A geiger counter would light up like a christmas tree near it. If you didn't understand what what was going on, or even worse, didn't have any understanding past "the needle is moving, oh no!", then the results would be at best worthless and at worst misleading. And in the end someone untrained would have wasted thousands of dollars for no reason.
Believe it or not radiation is a complex and not at all obvious thing. Most people haven't studied it in any significant fashion, in a university or otherwise. In the same way a doctor would never encourage someone to self diagnose, I would never encourage someone to measure radioactive exposure by themseves. It would be irresponsible for me to do so. And excuse all the comparisons, but I occasionally go to public outreach meetings and have become aware that people need things put in terms they understand. Especially smart people. Smart people tend to form an ignorant view, assume they are right, then assume some kind of conspiracy when they are informed they are wrong.
I dont know about the 700 million years part but I do know that all reactor fuel is made from U-235 and is very toxic and radioactive.
It is only highly radioactive AFTER it has been inside the reactor for a while. The radioactivity comes from the fission products which are neutron rich nuclei and so decay via beta decay. These are not produced in any significant quantity outside the reactor core because the U-235 neutron capture cross-section is ~1,000 times smaller for fast neutrons and so there is no noticeable chain reaction from a spontaneous fission event. Before the fuel is in the reactor it only poses a toxic hazard.
If you want proof have a look at this picture. It is someone wearing latex gloves and holding a uranium fuel pellet in front of a container of hundreds of fuel pellets. While this is safe for fresh pellets you would not do this after these pellets have been in the reactor core. Indeed when spent fuel rods (containing the pellets) are removed from a reactor they are stored at the bottom of a pool for a period so some of the radioactive fission products to decay because the fuel is so active.
That is why Slashdot in broken when it comes to anything nuclear related . . .
It isn't broken. Slashdot is one of the few places where you can get rational discussion about nuclear energy - everywhere else is full of misinformation and fear-mongering. The parent is correct - any potential danger from radiation is overblown. Anyone being honest would tell the submitter that spending money on a geiger counter is completely unnecessary from a safety standpoint.
This isn't politics - this is honesty. Nuclear is safer than virtually all other sources of energy, radiation is a limited and manageable threat, and it is cleaner and more cost effective than most alternatives. By any objective measure, we should be pursuing it, but people who don't understand the science get scared because radiation is invisible and scary.
Slashdot is of course on the "pro-nuclear" side
Slashdot has educated people, with backgrounds in science, who understand the issues involved in nuclear processes.
Your implication is that there are two reasonable sides to the argument: pro-nuclear and anti-nuclear. This is akin to saying that there are two sides to the flat earth debate. The only difference is that everyone knows the flat earth people are wrong, but it takes a substantial amount of education to recognize how badly wrong the anti-nuclear crowd generally is.
As for the topic of this thread, the idea of asking for a geiger counter to measure some pool that is probably barely above background (if at all) would be like somebody asking if he needs to buy a set of 11 super-powered turbo fans for his home computer that he uses for email that has been running a little slow lately.. He can buy the fans, and there might be some marginal use to them, but the money would be better spent dealing with real problems.
Yes, I have a background in nuclear physics. No, I don't think it makes me biased, I think it makes me informed.