Are you a denier of Fukushima radiation in your seafood?

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The first warning systems along North America's West Coast are not properly equipped. They currently have no 'noble gas monitoring' capability and have too little coverage.  Washington State, for example, has only 4 EPA stations.  

It is crucial to understanding this because official statements from experts about your exposures in the following days and weeks will sound reassuring and convincing but these statements are as weak as the deficiencies in radiation warning systems.

Our assessment is many countries, even the U.S., have weak radiation warning systems. But, at least for the U.S., it wasn't supposed to be that way. That is a long story, but this is the short version: in the aftermath of three radiological incidents in 1999 and 2000 (in Japan and the U.S.) that triggered a rare emergency status of the U.S. EPA, the environmental agency was confronted with the reality that its radiation monitoring capabilities in times of emergency were limited.

Two of the events were wildfires - that encroached on contaminated areas and facilities at Hanford Reservation and Los Alamos National Laboratory - and the third was a criticality incident that resulted in a radioactive gas release at a nuclear plant (Tokaimura) in Japan. 

The EPA decided to upgrade and expand its air monitoring network that is part of RADNET, which is America's government-operated but (mostly) volunteer-run nationwide radiation monitoring network.  The EPA envisioned new capabilities for RADNET including higher 'sampling density,' better turnaround time, and ability to detect radioactive noble gases (the nature of the release from the Tokaimura incident).

About five years ago, the EPA began moving forward with steps to improve RADNET but, inexplicably, the EPA failed to reconfigure RADNET's air monitoring network to detect radioactive noble gases; they also had problems with alpha detection upgrades.

In short, the U.S. has no static monitoring stations that have specialized detection ability for radioactive noble gases.  The existing monitoring capability in RADNET will not be useless, but EPA should use its deployable low-volume air samplers - specialized monitors for noble gases. On Wednesday, March 16, the EPA said it was sending out 'mobile units' - deployable monitors - to be arrayed along the Pacific - 2 in Guam, 3 in Alaska and 2 in Hawaii. These monitors, which aren't noble gas specialized monitors, would complement existing static stations. Such deployables were extensively used in concert with past U.S. nuclear testing in Nevada, which in fact did lead to Iodine-131 exposures and ultimately thyroid cancers of tens of thousands of Americans.

This is a map of the RADNET air monitoring coverage here.  There are very large gaps in the RADNET monitoring network in all three dimensions of space and in the multiple-dimensions of radiation detection.  Learn more about RADNET here.  Also, we have argued that CA, NV, and UT could be better protected during radiation crises via improvements to the 'CEMP' monitoring network.

Spectrometry - What the world needs now is radiation monitoring that can tell what's in the air, not just that the air is mildly, severely or lethally radioactive. At the Fukushima plant, we are not getting optimal data because the radiation monitoring equipment is inferior. There is monitoring technology that is in use by governments and industries but not used in the nuclear power industry in Japan or elsewhere. This technology is called real-time spectrometry. What it does is distinguish what specific radioactive chemicals are in the radiation plumes. This spectrometry technology is important because a cloud of radiation might be full of radionuclides that might decay in minutes or hundreds of years, but we wouldn't know with the current technology installed at Fukushima and in most places in the world including just about every nuclear plant on Earth. A plume with very short-lived radiation will be safe by the time it gets to non-evacuated areas. Another plume with longer-lived radionuclides won't be safe anywhere.

Increase monitoring density in U.S. - What governments and provinces and states need to do this very moment is vastly increase the density of these kinds of radiation equipment across the Northern Hemisphere. The U.S. EPA operates a 100 station radiation monitoring network in the U.S. that is one-tenth of what it could and should be. The EPA recently said they are adding mobile radiation monitoring units - a total of seven - to Guam, Pacific and Alaska. They have just 40 more mobile units that they haven't deployed. This is unacceptable. The U.S. EPA needs to immediately fill in huge gaps on America's West Coast where plumes 50 miles, even 100 miles, wide can pass undetected. The EPA needs to act now to plug coastal gaps in Oregon - which has just 2 EPA stations (west of Medford & Newport need 'plugs') - and Washington state - which has just 4 of them (for the entire state). State leaders aren't being honest with you: there should be dozens of mobile monitors in each state now. State leaders need to press the EPA, which has the staff, budget and ability, to purchase or borrow more deployable monitors and boost by ten-fold its RADNET monitoring network across the States. The EPA said it's waiting to deploy its 40 remaining mobile monitors 'if we feel a need.' There is a need for them - and then some - right now.

Increase monitoring density outside U.S.- Crucial: In Japan, monitors with real-time spectrometry must to be added tout-suite in Fukushima and all prefectures. In Canada, dozens of deployable real-time spectrometric radiation monitors should be deployed in each province now, not just British Columbia. Canadian government officials should make every attempt to communicate with indigenous populations that subsist on lichen-grazing animals about the risk of their exposures, which in the 1960s was worse than any human population on Earth outside of the Marshall Islands. Lichen measurements should be speedily conducted and that radiological data provided to vulnerable populations and communicated in realistic and honest terms. Governments, including the U.S. via EPA, must keep these deployable monitors operating for the next year at least as the reactors in Japan will be bled slowly of radioactive gas to eventually allow workers inside and decommission the dead reactors.

EPA can do even more - The U.S. EPA has stated in the recent past that the U.S. is deficient in noble gas radiation capability but it never implemented these capabilities. EPA can buy or borrow deployable noble gas monitors right now and use them. The EPA also needs to be more vigilant and transparent in the coming weeks, months and years concerning this crisis. The EPA needs to be more responsive to the public and journalists. The EPA didn't give a response to a McClatchy Newspaper reporter's question, as mentioned in a March 16, 2011, article which stated: 'Neither state nor EPA officials could answer questions Tuesday on what happens if elevated radiation levels are detected, how quickly the data is analyzed and who is notified.' ['More nuclear radiation monitors may be placed in rural Alaska' by Erika Bolstad, Rob Hotakainen and Renee Schoof]

Monitoring networks must be set to emergency mode - The U.S. EPA's RADNET, the U.S DOE's 'CEMP' and Canada's monitoring networks, along with all citizen-run radiation monitoring networks, must be set to operate in emergencies. How? Network operators should know that during radiological emergencies data intervals need to be shortened; data must be averaged at intervals of seconds not minutes. This is done by Geiger Counters automatically but not necessarily for large-scale monitoring networks; this sometimes can be done remotely by operators. That should be accomplished immediately. Monitoring network operators also should confirm that their equipment can operate and is now set to operate in higher-than-normal radiological environments. We suspect that the radiation monitoring network run by the US DOE in Nevada, California and Utah can only read as high as 800 microRem/hr, also written as 0.8 milliRems/hr, or 8 microsieverts/hr. If this is true, the network will be useless when levels rise above 50 times background levels. The Desert Research Institute (DRI) in Las Vegas, which runs this network on contract, must consider if any 'CEMP' station has this limitation and remedy the problem so CEMP does detect and record higher levels. Desert Research Institute mustn't manipulate, censor nor delete publicly-accessible archival data like it did during the Milford Flat Fire. The Institute has recently put up a notice saying that recent routine calibration tests created short-blips in gamma readings at two stations (Overton and Mesquite) on March 17th, and at the Las Vegas, Henderson, and Boulder City stations on March 18th.

All operators of radiation networks must strive for full transparency - they should provide online archives of raw, unaltered data. This isn't - to our knowledge - being done by TEPCO or the U.S. DOE via 'CEMP' which doesn't store unaltered datasets online. With regards to TEPCO data, we can only see 24-48 hour windows of data and the menu options don't have multi-language functionability. TEPCO must ensure publicly accessible archives of unmanipulated radiation data. TEPCO must install real-time spectrometry and run low- and high-volume air sampling across the entire length of Japan.

Why monitoring improvements are mandatory - Bad monitoring ultimately leads to the failure of key functions of public health management. The U.S. government spent billions and billions of dollars to blow up nuclear bombs in the air in Nevada, yet health researchers now have no idea where the radiation went. The predecessor to the Energy Department simply didn't want to spend the money to better monitor. The predecessor to the US EPA didn't want to expand its network. This failure to better monitor is one of the greatest blunders of U.S. public health administration. We discuss this on our gummed-film monitoring problem page.

We hear and read about 'cancer clusters,' one of which led Richard Miller, a toxicologist in Texas, to study radioactive fallout patterns from atomic weapons detonations in Nevada for his book 'Under the Cloud'. The great frustration of toxicologists, statisticians and health professionals is that no matter how much you crunch the Nevada bomb fallout data accumulated via inadequate monitoring in the 1950s, the results are as questionable as the data itself - no one knows where the fallout truly landed and no cancer clusters can be causally linked to what fell where. If cancer clusters appear in Alaska 10 years from now or leukemia clusters appear 5 years from now in California, how are we to know what caused them based on sparse data from the present-day 2 or 5 monitoring stations arrayed per U.S. state, territory or region? The plumes can easily 'fly' around these monitors undetected. How? They aren't radar stations. Radar can detect a fleet of bombers tens or hundreds of miles away. Monitoring stations cannot tell what is 25 feet away. Monitoring stations can't even tell what is floating above them. These monitors are single points on the ground that only detect what is in the air at that point. Plumes of radioactivity even at ground-level can easily 'drive' undetected through several hundred-mile long gaps along the Pacific coast in North America where there are no radiation monitors.

Citizens can urge their elected leaders and directly contact their environmental agencies to suggest these improvements to monitoring. They should also call or email local reporters and suggest a story on this topic.

Finally, governmental environmental agencies, like the U.S. EPA, should provide free, expedited shipping and Geiger Counter calibration services to help citizens in the following months. Citizens shouldn't be a substitute for a radiation monitoring network; but they are right now. If environmental agencies give us a cold shoulder, we need to take things into our own hands. Literally. Citizens with handheld Geiger Counters across North America should report their readings online in a responsible, brief and empirical manner - with plenty of information about make, model, height of measurement, etc...to help others reliably interpret this data.

* Information about the nature of radioactive noble gases emitted by reactors is found here.

* Photographic film manufacturers are most likely terribly frightened by the imminent waves of radioactive plumes - they are just keeping quiet about it; manufacturing plants have radiation detectors on site and tiny increases in environmental radiation affect operations. In the 1950s, Kodak never shared with the public any information it collected itself and got privately though a secret agreement with the U.S. government about the frequent radiation plumes from bomb tests traversing the United States.

Iodine-131 in Air spectrum (March-? 2011)   (note: Chernobyl happened on Apr 26, 1986)
Average levels in U.S. air normally	Average levels in Danish air in May 1986	Level at which grazing cows produce 25 pCi/L in milk	Level at which grazing cows produce 250 pCi/L milk	Level at which grazing cows produce 700-1200 pCi/L milk	Peak level in Nevada  on May 10, 1986	High levels post- Chernobyl in U.S.	Average range in Denmark on May 4-5, 1986	Max  levels detected in Denmark in 1986 (on Apr. 27)
near zero	0.00001-0.1	~ 0.001	0.01	0.037	0.17	0.2-0.25	0.4-0.54	3
		Europe, you are roughly here		U.S. you are roughly here

^{Values overlap because the event concentrations overlapped; there have been many instances of I-131 in air above '3' units not shown here; units of iodine-131 in Bq/m3; based on scientific journal articles and government documents.   See 'Milk' section here to compare to 1960s levels in U.S.}

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Prefixes, conversions and equivalents

Tables about atomic elements, decay charts, fission yields

NuclearCrimes.org's sitemap and various public and government documents of interest we uploaded online: 1. 2.

'The greatest irony of our atmospheric nuclear testing program is that the only victims of U.S. nuclear arms since World War II have been our own people.' 
- Forgotten Guinea Pigs Report, 1980

Tips for arguing with radiation PR people
When they belittle your claims...	by comparing any exposure from their facilities to...	You say or ask...
...about your exposure to fallout from nuke plants or weapons testing fallout...	....background radiation...	'Background radiation doesn't mean it is harmless - it probably does cause a small portion of cancers.  If you are adding to the background radiation, you are adding to someone's risk.' 'How many more defective children will be born and how many cancers will be induced by this increase in 'background radiation'?
...about your exposure to fallout from nuke plants or weapons testing fallout...	...flying in a airplane...	'That is not a realistic comparison.  Radionuclides in fallout are incorporated into our bodies (tissue, bones).  Most of the radiation from cosmic rays is external.'
...about your exposure to fallout from nuke plants or weapons testing fallout...	... a chest x-ray...	'You don't ingest or inhale the radiation source from x-rays.  An x-ray lasts for a millisecond.  Fallout lingers in body tissue and bones for decades .'
...about your exposure to fallout from nuke plants or weapons testing fallout...	...eating a banana	'Potassium-40 is a naturally occurring radioisotope that has been present in foods and the environment on Earth for billions of years.  Potassium 40, which at normal body levels delivers an annual internal dose to the soft tissue of 20 millirem and 5 millirem to the bone, is not as hazardous as many forms of anthropogenic (meaning: artificial; manmade) radiation for several reasons.  One main reason is, unlike many types of manmade fission products, its environmental levels rarely peak to hundreds or thousands of times normal levels. Since 1945, we've seen a cycle of drastic rising and falling of levels of environmental anthropogenic radiation with nuclear accidents, non-accident releases, radioactivity blowing around, etc...  Another reason: some forms of anthropogenic radiation in the body do much more damage than potassium-40 for the same quantity of radiation. Dose tables printed in a 1970s document (NUREG 1.109 rev. 1 Oct. '77) by the NRC paint a spooky, yet realistic, picture for what happens to a radiation sensitive organ, the thyroid, when iodine-131 is consumed. A NRC formula indicates that 1,000 picocuries of iodine-131 gives a dose of 80 millirems to the adult thyroid and 140 millirems to the thyroid of an infant. Consider: one liter of 'Sunrise Dairy' (Kansas) milk in April 2011 had 1,518 pCi/L of Iodine-131. That was from Fukushima.
...about your exposure to fallout from nuke plants or weapons testing fallout...	...standing next to a smoke alarm....	'You don't ingest or inhale the Americium-241 from smoke alarms.  You're talking about the small gamma component of Am-241.  That's external exposure.'