Geiger counters are basically just devices which enable us to measure ionizing radiation. In the context of human activity we have to deal with “natural” radiation sources and “artificial” ones. Some of the materials emitting ionizing radiation are used for medicinal purposes (Radiation-Therapy), as an additive in paint and even in smoke-detectors but the majority of it is used to create electricity in nuclear power plants and to stockpile thermonuclear weapons of mass destruction (well, except in iraq, as we all know), so many could get scared and a few could get rich.

Source and more detail with per site incident information on this mashup:

https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1JvNHsKIGS2e2SY0qmlhMUfzY0mQ

But how do we deal with something we cannot actually see, hear, feel, smell or taste? Exactly! We just don't think about it. We never perceive it as potentially dangerous to our health until an accident happens and we have to find someone with a geiger-counter, we have to trust, who can tell us how sunny the “weather” is? Better we do it ourselves, so that we can independently get all relevant realtime and historic metrics in a decentralized p2p system, with a far lower risk of getting tainted/biased/wrong/no data, especially when we as people really need it.

That should be in common rational awareness instead of ignorance or fear. Just like rain. We all know rain is neither good nor bad. It's just rain. And when we stay out too long in the rain without the appropriate protective clothing, we might get soaked so bad, that we might get sick. Our brain determines our maximum allowed in-rain time and the level of protective gear we need to repel the rain so we just visually perceive how many rain drops we see and how big they are. That gives us the freedom to decide whether to stay indoors or to wear some form of raincoat or just to risk it.

Unfortunately our body won't help us with detecting ionizing radiation (although it can suffer badly from it). Lost sources and depleted uranium shells, that irradiate uncontrolled and unnoticed, are as much a real problem as the Kyshtym Disaster and reactor incidents or catastrophic accidents like Chernobyl or Fukushima. Not to mention future generations, which will have to deal with the long term nuclear waste deposition. That's where geiger counters come back in: They let us “see” radiation levels and therefore give us the freedom to decide if and how we want to go on as safely as possible.

After the recent nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan a lot of people started to realize the power of open, crowd-sourced radiation data and began to develop, build and buy geiger counters and geiger counter kits. Many share their local radiation levels through social networks and simple maps, like TDRM and SafeCast.

This would also be a great metric to collect for Argus and to display the data as an overlay in DSpace. Now imagine hundreds of these cheap solutions spread all over the world and sharing the metrics with one another to get a global Open Radiation Monitoring (ORM) network.