Not to dash your hopes or anything, but one of the limitations about any kind of radiation monitoring is whether anyone in a given country is *allowed* to perform any private testing.
For example, when I lived in Santa Fe a big stink was raised when residents of Los Alamos, home of the US National Laboratories (and one of the dirtiest nuclear sites ever) wanted to have private testing done of some of the neighborhoods bordering on the sites of the earliest reactors there. They wanted this after noticing that in some of these neighborhoods no one could find a household in which someone had *not* had cancer. The statistics were just off the chart, and naturally the residents suspected radiation leaking into the soil and ground water. But it turns out that no one was *allowed* to measure these things, because in the US the only agency that *is* allowed to monitor radiation levels is the Atomic Energy Commission. This is a leftover law from the Cold War, but it is still in effect, so any attempt to perform private testing is a violation of Federal law punishable by many years in prison. This may have changed in the years since, and I hope it has, but it was definitely true and all over the New Mexico headlines at the time. Another factor in the New Mexico scenario is that one in every four jobs in NM is provided by the US government, and no one was about to "bite the hand that feeds" by forcing them to do their own extensive studies and possibly leave themselves open to lawsuits and expensive clean-ups. It was similar to the lax (read, almost non-existent) drunk driving laws in the state. It has one of the highest incidences of alcohol-related accidents and deaths in the nation, but every year the Legislature fails to pass any bills trying to curb drunk driving. Why? I got to see why first-hand, because one of my hangouts in Santa Fe was a restaurant/bar next to the State Capitol, where I got to see the legislators drop by after a "hard day at work" and down 4-5 drinks before driving home. Local cops knew the story, and knew why no one would pass laws to make their lives easier and stop the deaths -- the legislators themselves were among the biggest offenders. You can't rely on the people who benefit from dirty chicken coops to guard the chicken coops... ________________________________ From: merudanda <no_re...@yahoogroups.com> To: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com Sent: Sunday, February 23, 2014 1:34 PM Subject: [FairfieldLife] RE: Ukraine? Certainly any news and media "output" has to be taken with a grain of salt especially if a journalist want us to believe they know what is in the head and mind of an politician and being on a location for a few minute knows it "all". VIde“an oceanographer's in-joke” maximum wave heights of the tsunami generated by the Japan earthquake taken for showing radiation spreading across the ocean from Japan: Since lived there at the time and many years later in the surrounding area have to say models are one thing (easily proven wrong in one area of the model, with no data in other areas, etc.), actual widespread and frequent monitoring, not just some the dose rate (which can be a combination of so many variables), but specific for concentrations of various isotopes (at least I-131 and Cs-134 for evidence of recriticalities after 2011), and definitely Cs-137, Co-60 and Sr-90; perhaps also Pu-139/240 too, in water, in sediment, in plankton, in Tuna, etc., at least weekly and all over the Pacific and around should be and has been utmost importance http://cerea.enpc.fr/en/fukushima.html That's a minimum to make statements.Unfortunately some government barely monitors deposition, has made no attempts to identify the hotspots, and thus that far more monitoring is needed not only by private organization and initiative(here ref .to Asian area).
