And now a word from our:

"Paranoid Peanut Gallery":

I strongly recommend that everyone get their BoB's and Hurricane Preps up to date NO MATTER WHERE you live in the USA and Canada.

www.radiationnetwork.com/RadiationNetwork.htm

www.squall.sfsu.edu/crws/jetstream.html

The second one should be http://squall.sfsu.edu/crws/jetstream.html, I think.

WM, thinking fall out? Or panic?

Fallout? You have got to be kidding. Russia could nuke Tokyo with cobalt bombs and Florida wouldn't get fallout. The figures so far of radioactive releases are quite small. I'm not worried.

Panic? I guess the usual hair-on-fire folks will freak out over any little thing, real or imagined, but the vast majority, at lest those still sane, don't seem freaked out quite yet. Oh wait ... nope. The neighbors loaded all the kids ... might have been a run for the hills but it turned out to be they are going to a movie. So far, no panic.

Better Animated jetstream link

Also: U.S. West Coast in Path of Fallout

I remember the Chernobyl disaster. The local University (Dundee) Physics department decided to take a sample from an Estonian coal ship (about 800-900 miles North of the Chernobyl reactor) that had docked at Dundee Docks about 3-4 weeks after the explosion. The coal dust sample turned out to be the hottest radiological source at the University and legally had to be disposed off under nuclear reprocessing legislation and had to be sent to Sellafield reprocessing/storage site in Cumbria.

Governments will keep folks in the dark, just as they did in the Windscale fire in 1957. National security interests such as too 'don't panic the population' always become convenient reason for not telling the truth to the dangers of nuclear fallout. Even Andrei Sakharov begged to the political leadership of the old USSR not to detonate the Tsar bomb because of the 30-60,000 deaths he calculated the bomb would cause due to the fallout.

Weird! It would appear both links have gone down.

Must be a government conspiracy!

Ah the days before the Internet, when Government conspiracies were always a lot easier or would that be harder to put into practice. All you needed then was a radio and some spare batteries.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVvR7P9heH8&

Well, snipping the trailing part off the first link reveals that http://www.radiationnetwork.com/ is alive and kicking. I'm a big fan of online measurements. I can't vouch for the reliability of this service, though.


The USSR government did not bother to warn anyone in the outside world about the Tsjernobyl accident before Sweden found increased radiation levels close to one of the Swedish reactors. Reliable access to fresh data is good.


Most likely, the Japanese government could calm things considerably by posting online radiation levels along with explanations about what those numbers really mean. Radiation comes from a huge range of processes and materials, and it is far from trivial to convert those numbers into the answer everyone wants: What impact will this have for me and my loved ones?

www.radiationnetwork.com now is online with a few monitoring stations.

Just a little historical perspective. There were a couple of nuclear events in Japan in August, 1945 that apparently had little tangible effect downwind in the United States.

Monitoring is still a good thing. I am not sure about government paranoia, however. There is just a whole lot we simply don't know.