Elevated Radiation Claimed At Tokyo 2020 Olympic Venues

An anonymous reader writes "A citizens' group in Tokyo claims to have found elevated levels of radioactivity at 39 sporting venues earmarked for the 2020 Olympic Games. Expert and organizers are cautious about the findings but see no problem, as the levels do not pose an immediate threat to human health. From the article: '"It is difficult to have this debate unless we know for sure whether this radiation is from Fukushima or whether it is naturally occurring background radiation," said Pieter Franken, founder of the Japan office of the environmental monitoring organization Safecast."

Comments

I look forward

[Iconoc]

to allow the glowing comments about the athletes.

Fukushima or naturally occurring

[TurtleBay]

'"It is difficult to have this debate unless we know for sure whether this radiation is from Fukushima or whether it is naturally occurring background radiation" -Pieter Franken. I always find this sentiment a little odd. People care too much about if the radiation is measurably above background radiation or what the source of the radiation is. What they should care about is if the radiation is at a dangerous level. We have gotten better at measuring this stuff, so just because we can measure (very small) increases in radiation from Fukushima doesn't mean we should change our lives around it. Anything that is on the same magnitude as background radiation is pretty much safe. For example, you get increased radiation from flying in a plane because the atmosphere is much thinner. Also, natural radiation is much higher near the poles than near the equator, but nobody gets upset about this because it is "natural" like kale.

Some numbers for reference.

[marcansoft]

Using my Safecast Onyx (hi Safecast folks!) I measure ~0.32 uSv/h in Dublin, next to a granite wall (granite is everywhere around here, and naturally radioactive). The article speaks of of 0.484 uSv/h, not much higher than that. On an airplane at cruising altitude I get about 2.0uSv/h. At home I might see 0.08uSv/h, and in the middle of the street somewhere around 0.15uSv/h. *

I just visited japan and took the Safecast everywhere I went. At no point did it go significantly above what were normal background radiation readings in Dublin (not even when I was passing by Fukushima station, though admittedly that was on a high-speed train).

Radiation is everywhere. Unless you can identify the source as the Fukushima disaster, it might be perfectly normal. Even if the source is Fukushima, at low levels, at some point you have to stop worrying about it and realize that plenty of other places on Earth have higher naturally occurring background radiation.

* Rough numbers pulled from memory in CPM and converted to uSv/h using the conversion factor in the firmware source code, since my Onyx battery is dead at the moment. Take with a grain of salt.

Re:Some numbers for reference.

[Frosty Piss]

I just visited japan and took the Safecast everywhere I went. At no point did it go significantly above what were normal background radiation readings in Dublin...

Obviously there has been some sort of nuclear catastrophe in Dublin that your government is covering up.

Here's the letter and data

[evilsofa]

This appears to be the letter and the data that started all this:

http://olympicsokuteikai.web.fc2.com/encontents.html

Perhaps the most crucial part of the letter is this:

"Just before the Fukushima power plant accident, the mean value of the atmospheric radiation in Tokyo was estimated as 0.04 Sv/h, and radioactive Cesium was almost non-existent. Therefore, atmospheric radiation value above this level can be regarded as the effect of the nuclear accident."

Is that a valid assumption?