Google sends Street View car into Fukushima dead zone Google’s Street View project took an unusual left turn this week after one of it's familiar camera mounted cars took to the streets of Namie – a town in Japan’s Fukushima Prefecture deserted nearly two years ago after the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. A Google spokesperson confirmed to The Reg that the unusual …
I visited last year. The tsunamic-smashed coastal plains are now very clean with well organised large mounds of segregated debris. The exclusion zone around the reactors is small now and so there are perfectly accessible but effectively deserted towns in the vicinity because the economies have been ruined/folk are still afraid.
There are no "Freedom" camps-of-Stalkers.
Back to serious. For anyone who can read german:
With the restricted areas at end-of-2012 depicted:
Evakuierungszone_Fukushima.jpg
Area 1: Load < 20 mSv/y - You can move around but can't stay the night.
Area 2: Load > 20 mSv/y - Restricted access
Area 3: Load > 30 mSv/y - Only short-time access under special circumstances permitted
Yes, but radiations in Dartmoor and Cornwall are green (natural) and so balming and politically correct. Likewise, if you fell from you roof fixing solar panels, the snow-white (clean) angels will carry you straight to Paradise. If you die hit by alpha-particle from a passing spent-fuel container, then polluted (a lot of sulfur dioxide!) Hell is your fare. Yes, all radiations are equal, but some radiations are more equal than other.
Nope, you want to know the ground-level information, not a few hundred metres up.
I really hope they did include measuring the radiation - in fact, it would also be very interesting to do that everywhere.
I'd love it if radiation levels around the world became well-known, in the medium term it would remove the hysteria and replace it with the simple respect radiation deserves.
We'd all be safer for that.
That may be because it's the guy actually taking the photograph?
Another Map of Japan, sadly not with underlying images.
I once amused myself to overlay Fukushima and Chernobyl maps. As El Reg does not provide image upload, I shall upload this to a known den of scum and villany, where it survives only limited time:
More like Cornwall.
Only a narrow corridor is actually above 30mSV/yr.
There's an especially good article here..
http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/RS_Radiation_declines_at_Fukushima_0603131.html
Combine that with the actual medical stats as highlighted by Wade Allison* and frankly, there's no reason not to live even there.
The problem is of course that if someone did, and - for unrelated reasons - died of cancer or something, the lawsuits would cost more than the loss of the reactor.
*Radiation and Reason. http://www.radiationandreason.com/
Still waiting for Lewis Page's article backtracking on his claims of how it was all overblown and would have no significant effects. That 5km scale mark is pretty small - this is a significant and large area that has effectively been rendered uninhabitable as a result of the disaster. (Disclaimer: I still believe in nuclear power as a viable energy source, just that the triumphalist tone of his repeated articles around that time got a bit wearing)
As a few earlier posts have pointed out, most of the evacuated area is less radioactive than Cornwall.
Unfortunately there is an outright panic attack whenever radioactivity is mentioned, regardless of the actual level.
Going through US airport security (excluding the flight) probably used to give you a bigger dose due to the X-ray backscatter machine than a day's visit to the "Area 2"
- Hard to be sure as the data on those was never published and probably wasn't ever measured for the staff and the queue.
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