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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."
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.
+1
Or even better...spend the money on a vasectomy. It isn't fair to have a child who will be severely disadvantaged in this world by a naive, scared, lazy parent. You shouldn't have kids.
Also clean your gutters.
u-235 doesn't emit "neutron rays", it decays by alpha emission into Th-231, with a half life of 700 million years. You can even hold a piece of the metal in your hand, wearing just the gloves of a rad suit so you don't have ingestible particles left on your skin. Sure, in a running reactor or exploding old-style fission bomb it can absorb neutron and then fission into many things including neutrons, but there are no exploding reactors or atomic bombs in Tokyo. In general, you need never worry about neutron fields, the situations that would put you in one are generally uniformly fatal.
sure .... I tell you what you demonstrate this to me while i'm behind a thick lead glass window and survive and I will be impressed.
Ass.
Precisely. People who procreate, when they can't even manage to live their own lives without help from others, are indeed asses.
Those poor ass-kids don't stand a chance. But they do make good consumers and employees. ;D
I see that your optimism is lost :P
You misunderstand.
I am totally optimistic that we can solve the world's resource problems, class warfare, engineered famines, etc by breaking the cycle of mindless procreation by people who don't have their heads on straight.
In an ideal world, I'd prefer that the obviously-clueless OP reconsider having kids, to prevent their suffering.
But if he does, I am also optimistic that I could sell tons of useless crap to his kids, and also hire them as my wage slaves so they can afford to buy more of that stuff.
Either way, I'm optimistic. Just offering some advice.
This is why fuckwits such as yourself shouldn't be allowed to control who has children.
Wow. Who said anything about controlling who has children? Oh right. Just you.
I only offered advice to someone who presented themselves as a poor candidate for parenthood. The decision is still up to them. And if they have slow & fearful kids, we can always use those kids as customers or workers. ;o)
Here's some advice for you: If you find yourself swearing at someone, you are almost certainly acting from your lizard brainstem instead of your human cortex. Human up. I'm optimistic that you can behave calmly and rationally if you try. :)
...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 ...
I think we have to view the question in the context of this poster is living in Japan and the Japanese government can not be trusted to give out accurate and trust worthy information.
To put it in your analogy the town doctor is saying everything is fine but the doctor is being payed by the company that is polluting the town.
So what this poster is really asking is how does he go about protecting his family from radiation exposure from the Fukoshima disaster ?.