Pieter and Akiba from Safecast Japan arrived for meetings at MIT Media Lab this past week. The first thing they wanted to do was see what the radiation levels looked like in Boston, compared with Japan. They were immediately impressed with relatively low levels on the surface of the streets compared with Japan.
Pieter and Akiba, out of necessity, worked with their teams in Tokyo, including Tokyo Hackerspace and Keio University, to develop a rapidly deployable system for logging and mapping radiation and identifying safe areas and hotspots. The lack of reliable data on the ground in Japan spurred some remarkable innovation by this bright collaborative team.
On June 2 an important meeting took place between the Safecast team and c-10, a nonprofit organization that has been monitoring radiation levels around the Seabrook Nuclear Power Station in Northern Massachusetts, Southern New Hampshire. The situation in Japan truly emphasizes the importance of the monitoring programs of organizations like c-10, that can both assure communities that they are safe – and also alert communities when there is a problem.
Pieter and Akiba mounted their mobile sampling station, the “B-Geigie” (so named because it is about the size of a Japanese bento box), on the side of our rental car. They logged data to compare it with Japan data. So here is the map of the first Safecast drive outside the U.S. You can view the current data from c-10 here.
More on Safecast here. Recent Safecast drives in Japan posted here.
