New Radiation Hotspots Prompt Japan To
Extend Monitoring
Fukushima Power Plant
EMF Protection Devices
Magnetic Field Detector
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."
As well as being slow to broaden the monitoring, Mr Gill
says the figures being provided by the authorities are
"extremely inconsistent."
The education ministry, charged with compiling data, says
on its web site that the maximum level of radiation in
Fukushima Prefecture at present is 2.3 microsieverts per
hour, while elsewhere on the same site it is showing a
reading of 16.2 microsieverts in the hamlet of Nagadoro, on
the edge of the exclusion zone.
"Not only is that figure extremely high, but it's not
going down," said Gill. "The village authorities' official
line is that the residents will be able to go back in two
years, and that might be so in some areas, but it is almost
certainly out of the question for other areas."
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