Tokyo Radiation: Show Us the Digits

If picture can be worth a thousand words, what price a number? Especially one measuring radiation?

For most Tokyo residents, fears over radiation from the crippled nuclear complex at Fukushima Daiichi have never really scaled the heights, barring some unsettling early readings from the Tokyo Metropolitan Government’s Shinjuku monitoring center in the days after the March 11 disaster. But news that much more radiation was released from the plant than previously calculated has left a jarring question for some: just how much radiation from Japan’s worst-ever nuclear crisis made it to Tokyo?

Now the Tokyo Metropolitan Government is trying to soothe citizens’ concerns by assisting local authorities in measuring radiation levels at grass-roots levels. Some private efforts to measure radiation levels have been in place for some time, such as the live campus measurements posted by Tokyo University, but the central Tokyo authority is now allocating extra resources in an effort to respond to what it describes as “many calls” from worried residents who do not have access to measurements in their area.

A spokesman from the Tokyo government’s Bureau of Social Welfare and Public Health says that to step up monitoring, the city authority has divided the capital into a grid of 100-120 squares measuring 16 square kilometers apiece. Local ward government representatives will be asked to decide where to place the radiation measuring instruments within each square in a meeting scheduled for Friday. Starting June 15, two teams will be dispatched to measure radiation levels in each of the chosen locations. Since the Tokyo metropolitan government only has about 70 measuring instruments, the operation should take about two weeks.

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