Tag Archives: radiation

MakeZine.com: “civilian-friendly” Geiger counter

Laura Cochrane, writing on Makezine.com, reports on the development of  A Stylish and More User-Friendly Geiger Counter:

Coming on the heels of the year anniversary of the Japanese Tohoku-Oki earthquake, Bunnie Huang, a member of the MAKE Tech Advisory Board, tasked himself with designing a civilian-friendly Geiger counter. He was inspired by the efforts of Safecast, an organization whose goal is to build an open sensor network that aggregates trustable, source-neutral radiation monitoring data.

The problem with the current crop of radiation monitors is that they are basically laboratory instruments: accurate & reliable, but bulky, expensive, and difficult to use, requiring a degree in nuclear physics to understand exactly what the readings meant. Another problem with crises like these is that while radiation monitoring is important, it’s something that is typically neglected by the civilian population until it is too late.

Therefore, the challenge set out before me was to design a new Geiger counter that was not only more intuitive and easier to use than the current crop, but was also sufficiently stylish so that civilians would feel natural carrying it around on a daily basis.

We need one of these on every block, and lots of radiation detectors with IP addresses, widely dispersed. Because we need that many, essentially in a distributed network, we should be able to manage large economies of scale, with substantial reductions in  price.

Peter Grier/CSM: Japan nuclear crisis: Why are the spent-fuel pools so hard to control? – CSMonitor.com

By  Peter Grier, CSMonitor.com, dated  March 22, 2011. Japan nuclear crisis: Why are the spent-fuel pools so hard to control? – CSMonitor.com:

As workers struggle to bring the Fukushima I nuclear plant back under full control, spent-fuel pools appear to be a source of continuing problems. On Tuesday morning, one pool was so hot that its remaining water was either boiling or close to it, according to the Associated Press.

Emergency crews dumped 15 tons of seawater into the pool to cool it to about 105 degrees F., Japanese authorities said later in the day.

If heat in the pool continues to build and water boils down and fuel rods stored in the pool are exposed, more radiation might escape into the atmosphere.

Yet firetrucks and other water-pumping equipment have been shooting streams of water at these pools for days during the Japan nuclear crisis. Why are they so proving so difficult to manage?

The pools at the Fukushima complex are just that – open basins resembling swimming pools. Six are perched on a sort of mezzanine above and adjacent to reactor containment vessels. They’re about 40 feet long by 30 feet wide by 36 feet deep, though they vary in size.

In total they can hold about 1,300 to 1,400 metric tons of water, serving as both a shield to keep radiation from escaping and a coolant to lower the residual heat that spent fuel rods generate.

The pools contain anywhere from 400 to 700 fuel-rod assemblies, according to data compiled by the Union of Concerned Scientists. These assemblies sit on racks just above the pool floor. During normal operation, the water level in the pools is kept about 30 feet above the top of the assemblies.

But these are not normal times. Though electric lines have now been hooked up to all six reactor units, the pumps that circulate cooling water inside reactor buildings are not yet working. Some have been damaged and will need to be replaced.

Temporary pumps and firetrucks are doing what they can to keep water in the pools. A powerful cement-pumping truck that will be used to shoot water, greatly increasing pumping capacity, arrived at Fukushima on Tuesday, according to Japanese authorities.

But Fukushima workers “don’t have the array of pumps they might otherwise have,” said David Lochbaum, director of the nuclear safety project at the Union of Concerned Scientists, in a Tuesday phone briefing for reporters.

It’s possible that the workers are thus practicing triage, disconnecting pumps from fuel pools in order to rush water through reactor cores, or an adjacent pool that is in greater danger, said Mr. Lochbaum.

Boiling water by itself is not a danger, he pointed out. The problems would begin if water boiled away, exposing fuel rods. If a pool is fully filled, that would take some time.

“That might be a strategy that they are employing, based on the limited array of equipment they have at the moment,” he said.

It is also possible that one or more of the pools is leaking. t is also possible that one or more of the pools is leaking. The sides of the pools have doors, which open to allow cranes to move fuel-rod assemblies from the reactor to the pool. These doors have inflatable seals that guard against leakage.

a Japan nuclear crisis: Why are the spent-fuel pools so hard to control? – CSMonitor.com.

Eric Mack/CNET: Crowdsourced Radiation Tracking

Radiation Symbol via NMSU.edu

It’s becoming increasingly clear that, as the dispersal of radiation becomes the most pressing question, distributed and redundant radiation detection (as well as wind-speed and wind direction) is what’s called for.  Perhaps radiation detectors with IP addresses, or which can be connected to smart phones.

And Sahana – the free and open source software which is becoming the international standard for managing disaster response. seems an ideal platform for posting and sharing this type of information at many intervals, from many nodes, all geo-tagged.

Here’s Eric Mack’s From Tokyo to California, radiation tracking gets crowdsourced, published on CNet News.

The intensifying nuclear crisis in Japan is raising anxieties on both sides of the Pacific over the potential impacts of radiation exposure, and a relative dearth of official information on radiation levels is leading some to turn to crowdsourced options.

Japanese officials warned residents living near the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant to stay indoors after a third explosion at the plant in four days, followed by elevated radiation levels around the plant, which the officials said were high enough to harm human health. Panic was reported in Tokyo, as radiation levels rose to as much as 23 times the normal level, according to some reports.

With official estimations of the threat from radiation across Japan changing rapidly and sometimes inconsistent, a number of real-time amateur radiation monitors have popped up online. A live geiger counter at altTokyo.com updates a graph with data every 60 seconds, and a uStream channel broadcasting the digital display of another Tokyo geiger counter was drawing more than 14,000 viewers earlier today.

A few thousand miles across the Pacific to the east, state and federal officials in Hawaii and West Coast states said they did not anticipate any threats to public health from radiation drifting in from Japan. Despite such reassurances, Arizona-based GeigerCounters.com is seeing a run on radiation monitoring equipment. The site was down for a while following the announcement of the Fukushima leak, and came back online this morning with this message:

Due to the disaster in Japan, orders for Geiger Counters have outstripped supply. Initial orders were filled immediately from stock on the shelves at our location and the warehouses of our suppliers. But at this point, there are simply not enough detectors available to meet the overwhelming demand. At least one of our suppliers has adopted a “triage” method of doling out the limited supply of detectors remaining until more can come off the factory line.

Eric Mack’s From Tokyo to California, radiation tracking gets crowdsourced, dated March 15, 2011, published on CNet News.