The Safecasting drives officially started after my last trip to Japan, so I’ve been watching from afar as Pieter and an ever growing volunteer team of total heros have set out time and time again to try and map the radiation levels in the areas surrounding the Fukushima plant, as well as the rest of Japan. Knowing that I was going to be back in Tokyo for a number of Safecast meetings and the Radiation Seminar at the same time that Miles O’Brien and Xeni Jardin were going to be working on a story for PBS News Hour that had some focus on Safecast, organizing a drive seemed like an obvious option.

On my last transatlantic flig ht I measured over 800 CPM on the flight. Seeing over 1000 CPM in the car was a bit shocking, opening the door and putting the device on the ground in the middle of the street and seeing it climb, in a matter of seconds, to almost 16,000 CPM was, well, I still don’t even know how to describe it. I was completely taken aback by this. We were maybe one city block from where the officers were standing – outside and unprotected and decided we needed to go back and talk to them.

The officers were very polite and happy to talk to us. We asked them if they were concerned that they were standing outside all day with no protective gear and they told us their bosses have assured them it is perfectly safe and so they have to trust them.

We told them about the readings we’d taken just steps from where they were and offered to show them personally that the levels were incredibly high – they declined saying they needed to trust the authorities. Which was weird, because to most people – they are the authorities.

We measure radiation all the time, and were noticeably shaken after seeing the readings we just had, and these guys were being told there was nothing to worry about. Suddenly some sort of commanding officer arrived and told us we had to leave and everyone stopped talking to us. Like turning off a switch.

We got back in the car and drove about 1km away the other direction away from the roadblock.

It was here that we took our highest and most concerning readings of the day. The parking lot of the restaurant was active, but less than we’d just seen. But when we walked across the street – maybe 10 feet away, we measured over 20,000 CPM and 9 µSv/hr. We pulled out our SAM 940 to try and identify the isotopes and found things we weren’t expecting at all. So we grabbed some samples to send to a lab for professional analysis and got out of there quick.

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