Tools

Gear:

Upon our return to Japan in May of 2011 after temporarily evacuating Tokyo during the early days of the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear crisis, we bought (at a slightly elevated price) the Quarta-Rad Radex RD1706. This is a great little machine which is quite accurate and has served us many, many surveys over in environmental investigations and decontamination. We began however, to see its limitation and upgraded to an Eberline RM 19 in addition to a 1" Scintillation probe from Radiation Measurement Technologies in June for more accurate estimation upon the discovery of some nasty looking micro hotspots and relative inability to monitor air.

Very Happy with the ability of a scintillation counter, we began to extend concern into food monitoring. The 1" is sufficient to do the job within legal limits usually but with a small team developing, we decided it wouldn't hurt to have the big guns. We picked up the 2"NaI and Ludlums Rate Meters (one for timed estimates in CPM and another more easily portable model for quick check environmental surveying) along with Steven Sesselman's GS1100A from Bee Research in Australia upon the advice of a follower on Facebook and a bit of research to begin trying to understand the activity within those numbers with which we are all becoming all too familiar as expressed in μSv and Bq.

With a month of sleepless nights and neglected kiddos (thank you boys, you provide inspiration to move mountains) we picked and prodded this advanced technology like a first grader encountering shoelaces in a dark room.

This has become the Japan of now and we all need to know what is here. This is how it can be done within the reasonably achievable budget to protect our children from unnecessary internal exposure to radionuclides via their diet and play habits.

In December, we added a custom-built 11mm thick portable lead shielded well in order to reduce the background count from 7800 counts per minute to 780 counts in addition to a sound card upgrade to the Creative Sound Blaster 96khz 24bit external usb drive unit, providing much greater clarity and reducing our detection limit to 26.4 Becquerels per kilogram for radio-cesium.

There has been much talk of inaccurate "cheap" geiger counters. This type of misinformation can lead to danger as quickly as that in the other direction. We have always had and still have the hope that others will follow suit so that transparency from the civilian population is pushed into the limelight and potential health risks are not ignored or called safe when it is well known that the testing apparatus is simply inadequate to make such claims. It is our right in a free country to do this and we are grownups so it is also our job.