Posted on 08/25/2011 1:30:11 AM PDT by TigerLikesRooster
New radiation hotspots prompt Japan to extend monitoring
The discovery of radiation hotspots well beyond the exclusion zone around the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant has forced the Japanese government to increase its monitoring from six to 22 prefectures in the east of the country.
By Julian Ryall in Tokyo
7:38AM BST 25 Aug 2011
Elevated levels of radiation have been found 125 miles from the power plant, which was destroyed by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami. That is well beyond the 18-mile exclusion zone that has been imposed.
Officials in the city of Tokamachi, in northwest Niigata Prefecture, detected 27,000 becquerels of radioactive cesium per kilogramme (2.2lbs) of waste in a school compost heap. By law, any waste containing just 8,000 becquerels per kg must be treated as radioactive waste.
Experts and residents say the government should have begun monitoring further afield immediately after the plant began leaking radioactivity.
"Since the first week of the disaster, authorities have slowly been announcing that they would start checking fish, seaweed, vegetables for radiation," said Tom Gill, a British professor of anthropology at Meiji Gakuin University who is studying communities in the disaster zone.
"And the response in each case has - quite reasonably - to ask why it wasn't done previously," he said. "And this is no different."
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
P!
Just curious, why these stray patches of radiation couldn’t be plotted from a satellite or other aerial observation. All kinds of things like weather, vehicles, animals, and people could scatter it all over the country to places that are not contiguous with the main contaminated zone. If “corium” has a distinctive gamma ray signature from the mix of stuff that comprised it, that should be visible well up into the atmosphere (betas and alphas would not be visible though).
We might be able to. But we probably don’t want to talk about it...
Maybe they don’t really want to know...because then they would have to tell people
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