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Part 2 -Information, Misinformation, Disinformation? -Japans radiation monitoring

Posted by azby on December 29, 2012

Safecast

GOVERNMENT MONITORING POSTS

In recent months there has been a fair amount of controversy concerning the accuracy of the radiation monitoring posts the government has installed all over Fukushima prefecture, and in some neighboring prefectures as well. We wrote about it back in July, 2012:

TEPCO cheating on radiation levels by using “improved” monitoring posts

A MEXT radiation monitoring post, aka “droid,” of a common type manufactured by NEC . This one is at the former Akasawa Elementary School in Aizu-Misato.

There are almost 700 of these monitoring posts (675 at latest count), which we refer to as “droids” because of how they look (see photo above). They are all powered by solar panels and use storage batteries.
Through the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology (MEXT), the government spent a lot of money (we haven’t been able to find out precisely how much) to have them installed, and spent more money to have a web site made that displays the readings: MEXT realtime environmental radiation page

From this reasonably attractive-looking page, users are supposed to click on a prefecture, then on a region of the prefecture, and then choose from any one of a dozen or more municipalities. Then a scrolling list appears on the right hand side, and users can select a particular monitoring post to review (In the case of Koriyama City in Fukushima, there are 393 monitoring posts in the list). A zoomable, scrollable Google Fusion map appears, and the individual posts are marked by colored dots. Clicking a dot gives the current reading at that location, updated very 10 minutes it seems, and it is possible to download data for the entire month. So, thank you for doing that much, at least, MEXT.

This system sucks in many ways. While working with it in order to compare the MEXT readings with our own, we’ve found that it’s impossible to get an overview of more than a small part of Fukushima at any one time, that hunting down particular locations is incredibly time consuming and frustrating, that the cumulative time data does not go back far enough, and that the downloadable data comes with many restrictions and is difficult to pull down efficiently. Yes, MEXT made this system ADAP — As Difficult As Possible.

Screen capture from the MEXT online system of the area around Kawauchi Elementary school in Fukushima. The blue dots represent fixed monitoring posts, the blue diamond a reading taken with a handheld unit. One of the dots was selected, and the reading shown as 0.093 uSv/h (microsieverts per hour). The two fixed units at this location are actually much closer together than this map suggests (see photo further below).

The Safecast map of the same area. The most recent bGeigie readings for the road next to the school, from Nov 9, 2012, were in the 0.12 to 0.17μSv/h range. This is fairly consistent with what the droid shows. Readings taken on the same drive on the roads north and south of the school range as high as 0.18 μSv/h. Safecast readings from a year ago, however, are in the 0.14 to 0.25 μSv/h range alongside the school and up to 0.29 μSv/h on the road to the north. On the one hand this shows that the range of variation we often encounter within a short distance can easily be a factor of two, sometimes more. The most recent readings also support the idea that the schoolyard the monitoring posts are located in has been decontaminated since last year, as has the road (A blogger has reported recently that some areas just beyond the schoolyard remain fairly contaminated, however). MEXT has made their data fairly easy to access for people who know exactly what they are looking for and just want a quick look, but it is extremely difficult and time-consuming to make this kind of close comparison with other data sets. And we couldn’t help but notice that we have a lot more data available for this area than the government provides.

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January 4, 2013 Posted by arclight2011 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Part 1 -Information, Misinformation, Disinformation? -Japans radiation monitoring

Posted by azby on December 29, 2012

Safcast

Whose job is it to make this stuff easy to understand?

“YOU CAN’T ALWAYS FIND WHAT YOU’RE LOOKING FOR…..”
[Skip to Part 2] At Safecast we assumed from the start that our data should be accurate, easy to understand, informative, well-visualized, and easily accessible. In many respects this simply reflects “best practices” in information design, as well as a vision of social responsibility in which openness and transparency are paramount virtues. So when we make decisions about how to present our data, we adhere to principles of intuitiveness, depth, context, and dare we say it, beauty in design. We want to make it as easy as possible (AEAP) for people to find what they’re looking for, and to find out what it means. That’s why we’re continually miffed when official sources of information seem to be operating under an entirely different set of assumptions.

To be honest, the seriousness of government missteps and opacity during the early weeks of the disaster led us to accommodate ourselves to vastly lowered expectations in terms of the quality and accessibility of information we’d probably see from official sources. Even though it’s their job, and they are legally required to provide many kinds of information, many of us prepared ourselves for endless tooth-pulling and fact-checking about radiation information. So first, I’d like to give a sort of brief status update:
1) The government has made a lot of information available, more than we expected (because we expected nothing).
2) It still needs to be scrutinized, fact-checked, and independently confirmed.
3) There are still some areas where a lot of us have been pulling teeth for months and still haven’t been able to get the information we’re looking for.

So let’s just agree to live with #2 and #3 for the moment. It means constant effort on our part, but enough of us are constitutionally well-equipped for this kind of research-based tug-of-war that it’s not really that onerous at this point. We get good at it, we build trust, and people who were once opponents sometimes become allies, because frankly, they need our help.

But #1 is where we find ourselves really scratching our heads. There is all sorts of official information available, and a lot of it is proving reliable, but it’s rarely as easily accessible or informative as it should be. In fact, locating and using the data is usually as difficult as possible (ADAP) considering how easy it is now to find good information and web designers, and how inexpensive it has become. It should be easy to do a good job, if the people in charge really care about doing a good job.

REPORTING THE RESULTS OF WHOLE-BODY TESTS:
One brief example would be how results of internal contamination monitoring done with whole-body counters (WBC) are being reported. These tests are being done in municipalities all over Fukushima prefecture, sometimes under the direction of the prefecture itself, more often by individual hospitals on behalf of their municipalities. Fukushima Prefecture has put up a web page to communicate the results of testing done through Oct. 2012, as well as a more detailed breakdown. They’ve gathered quite a lot of numbers for us:

The WBC report page provided by Fukushima Prefecture summarizes the key data in this table. It shows how something can be entirely accurate and extremely uninformative at the same time.[

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January 4, 2013 Posted by arclight2011 | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Petition: Evacuate Fukushima -Avaaz

Petition: Evacuate Fukushima

 

This very simple homemade video petitions is dedicated to all victims of 311 and the brave citizens of Tohoku.  Already over 10,000 written signatures were collected on the Avaaz petition .  Please sign this petition to support the children and become part of the solution.

January 4, 2013 Posted by arclight2011 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment

HINKLEY UPDATE: PROTESTERS FINED IN COURT -SchnewsUK

Published on 29th December 2012 | Part of Issue 834

Four anti-nuclear protesters were fined £100 each and given 12 months conditional discharge on Wednesday (19th) in Taunton magistrates’ court. The four had chained themselves together and blocked the main access outside the Hinkley power plant in November. The blockade stopped entry and exit onto the site for over four hours until a removal team arrived from nearby Bristol. In court the four pleaded guilty to obstructing the highway.  The action raised awareness and protested against the plans for reactors at the Hinkley C nuclear power station site in Somerset.

The defendants had no choice but to represent themselves in court as that was a better alternative to a duty solicitor according to one of the defendants SchNEWS spoke to, they went on to say “The outcome in court was expected and even though it could have been worse it is still not a good outcome. The conditional discharge restricts you from being active.”

In a statement taken from a press release on the stop hinkley website speaking after the verdict, tree surgeonZoe Smith from Bristol was in a defiant mood. “This is a national campaign and I expect there will be many more surprises for EDF over the coming months.

Barnaby Hodges, a catering worker from Glastonbury, said outside court: “I have never been arrested for protesting before, but like many people in Glastonbury I am ready to take whatever non-violent action is necessary to prevent the building of a potential Fukushima only 25 miles away. It’s not as if there aren’t any alternatives.”

There might be a small respite for the protesters as recent cutbacks at EDF’s parent company in France could mean long delays for the nuclear building programme. EDF has indicated for over a year now that it plans to spend billions on two reactors at the new plant at Hinkley. Confirmation is expected in March 2013 but with pressure from the French government to cut costs at the parent company the confirmation date might be pushed further away still.

http://www.schnews.org.uk/stories/HINKLEY-UPDATE-PROTESTERS-FINED-IN-COURT/

Stop Hinkley needs more supporters.

“…Stop Hinkley have a long and successful record campaigning against nuclear power at Hinkley Point and Oldbury. We campaigned vigorously on the dangers connected with running Hinkley ‘A’ and as a consequence BNFL reluctantly shut it down permanently in 2000. We have worked with regional BBC and ITV documentaries to highlight the risk from the crumbling old reactor at Oldbury. Now Hinkley Point is the proposed site for the first of a series of new nuclear power stations in the UK….”

http://stophinkley.org/WhatUCanDo.htm

January 4, 2013 Posted by arclight2011 | Uncategorized | Leave a comment