

Our last HEPA filter measurements January 22 produced some astonishing results. Doing a spot test on the Honeywell barrel-style filter and a Kenmore Plasmawave machine, we found radiation ~351% of normal background. The machines had been running for 42 days. The combined aggregate dust came in even hotter at 538% of normal background radiation at Radiation Station Santa Monica.

The California Highway Patrol considers anything over three times background, 300% of background and above, a trigger level to a hazardous materials situation.

Now, 43 days later, we tested the same HEPA filters in the same environment and setup using the same protocols to assure the high level of accuracy and quality control we have maintained for a year performing over 1,500 radiation tests in response to the triple meltdowns at the destroyed Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor complex in Japan some 5,000 miles upwind and upcurrent of Southern California. This time, as you can see in the video, the dust was a lot hotter. A spot check was ~377% of the previous background. Then we vacuumed out the filters with a HEPA filter Eureka vacuum cleaner and tested the aggregate.

The March 6 test of the combined dust came in at a sizzling ~668% of background or ~6.7 times normal. Since the last testing period, the radiation detected has risen another ~130% indicating a continued upward trend. These readings, not impacted by radon progeny as noted in Beta Watch, are the most serious indication yet the Southern California may be experiencing a rise in radiation due to the triple meltdowns at Fukushima in Japan.

That radiation may be rising in Los Angeles comes as no surprise considering the enormous amount of radioactive ‘buckeyballs’ filled with 60 uranium uranyls apiece that continue to be produced at the stricken nuclear reactor site for almost a year. A just-released U.C. Davis report describing the phenomena is also examined in Beta Watch.

A sign that buckeyballs could be being detected at Radiation Station Santa Monica is a comparison with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s RadNet detection station high on a building somewhere in Los Angeles, its location a secret. While the RadNet graph for gross beta radiation count from November 8, 2011 to March 7, 2012 has plenty of beta activity, the relative rise seen here in Santa Monica, much closer to the coast and therefore Pacific waters strongly buckyballs as a potential source. In this scenario, our Santa Monica location would pick up more of these radioactive nanospheres in much greater proportion than would a detecting unit miles farther inland, according to several British and European studies.

One year after the Fukushima meltdowns began, these readings indicate that ocean-borne radiation may be making its way into waters off of Southern California months before the inevitable tide of radioactive goo that will wash upon So Cal shores later this year through 2014.

EnviroReporter.com now posits that this radiation ahead of the main swell through repeated aeration resultant of choppy Pacific water in storms, may be picked up and moved on the winds as sea spray and mist moving ahead of the current.

No other explanation is more compelling than this mechanism of increased mobility of these hearty buckyballs. “[B]eing thermodynamically stable and kinetically persistent in the absence of peroxide, they can potentially transport uranium over long distances,” the U.C. Davis report reads adding, with dire implications for all 44 nations of the Pacific Rim, “The fuel matrix at the Fukushima-Daiichi site is mainly UO2, whose behavior will largely dictate release of matrix-incorporated plutonium and various other radionuclides into water used as a coolant.”