Almost seven years have passed since 3 · 11, and while we’ve been informed that the decommissioning of the reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant will take 40 more years, we wonder what will Fukushima look like 50 years after that, in 2111. To consider those questions, we will hold the Safecast Conference…
Safecast News
Ruthenium coverup continues
Several days ago, we published our first blog post about the notable release of Ruthenium-106 that was detected in Europe in late September-early October of this year. As we noted, detections of Ru-106 were confirmed by over 30 countries, and careful analyses performed independently by the national laboratories of France, Germany, and the Czech Republic…
The Bgeigie Diaries: Daiichi and the Dutch connection
Rob Oudendjik is one of the very early Safecast members. He was involved in many of the projects that laid the foundation for the current generation of bGeigies, as well as the way that Safecast gathers its data. He shares his memories of the early Safecast days, as well as what keeps him involved six…
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About that radioactive plume of Ru-106….
Above: The map released by IRSN on Nov. 9, 2017. Please note that it does not show the extent of the Ru-106 plume itself, but the likelihood that any of the grid points is the origin of the release. Updated Nov. 17, 2017, with information regarding a closed IAEA assessment made in mid-October, which was…
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Safecast Report 2017, Part 2.1 now available
The second installment of the 2017 Safecast Report is now available for download. Part 2.1: Situation Report — Issues at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Powerplant (FDNPP) is a 66-page A4-size print-quality pdf that provides a detailed description of conditions at the damaged powerplant. Sections are devoted to the overall plans for decomissioning, the spent fuel pools, contaminated…
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Safecast Bay Area Network kick-off
Pieter Franken and Sean Bonner are visiting the Bay Area and will be in Palo Alto on November 2nd. We thought it would be a great occasion to organize a first informal Bay Area Safecast meetup. Please join us for this opportunity to meet other Safecast volunteers in our region, get an update on the…
Safecast Summer Workshops Take Off In a Big Way – Especially with Kids
Safecast workshops were a whirlwind of activity in the late summer months with a series of events, many of which were for kids and families. One of the season’s highlights was the third Safecast Mori Kids’ Mirai Summer Camp Workshop on Radiation, held in Tokyo’s famous Roppongi Hills. The event took place over two sold-out…
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Data for Development
Safecast was happy to be asked by the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) to contribute a case study about our project to their new publication, Case Studies on Data for Development. The case study collection is part of the OECD’s larger 2017 Development Co-operation Report: Data for Development. The authors note: With the unfolding…
The bGeigie Diaries: Tokyo to Fukushima after the disaster
If there was a list of unsung Safecast heroes, Kyoko ‘Kiki’ Tanaka would be one of the first names on it. Kiki has been a core member since shortly after Safecast began, running the office side of the operation for a long time, and coordinating our Japanese volunteers. I spoke with her about some of…
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A Long Safecast Weekend
Above: Joe preps a drone for a pre-programmed flight in Tomioka. Safecast’s work involves so much technical knowledge that our online team discussions literally run 24 hours a day. Developing and maintaining the hardware and software side is very geeky work and occurs largely in the digital realm. But getting it out into the real…