Hackers Set Up Radiation Monitoring (Real-Time) in Japan

Before anything else, here's a realtime radiation map, courtesy of Ed Borden, followed by the explanation and instrucdtions excerpted from his blog there:

Here's my own contribution: a realtime display of radiation data mapped in 3d across Japan. This is built on the Google Earth API so you need the Google Earth Plug-in to view. If you don't have it, you might be asked to download it. It's worth it ;)

Note: once the search results appear, you can click and drag and zoom and pan, view graphs, view datastreams, go to Pachube feed pages, and whatever you want. Try clicking a marker and take it from there...

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Go to Pachube, at the link just above, for more maps, applications, and tutorials.  I would say that such a thing would be awesome to set up here in the US, but something tells me it is probably already being done.  Comment if you have info; I will post it as soon as I can. 

Mr. G. Suavite, fresh from Noisebridge, hipped me to this work being done right now in Tokyo by bright young men and women, hackers all, to bring a network of geiger counters online and make the readings useable for people.  These heroes are working together as first responders, and besides setting up geigers, they have been soldering ad hoc charging stations out of all the batteries from all the destroyed cars, to reestablish cell phone communications "which is the backbone of Japanese media access... the phone is their primary internet device for simply finding family members... they initially started rolling out their high gain long distance internet nodes and router repeater stations to bring the internet back to afflicted areas -- but upon their first meeting they decided their efforts were better spent on higher priorities, such as light, power, cell phone connectivity  --- and geiger counter radiation monitoring networks." (Note: the Noisebridge info has been written up at Wired and Make Magazine, whose names are hopefully links by the time you see this). He directed me to freaklabs.org, from whence the map above.  At freaklabs I found the article below, as well as their real time geiger readings, which I will embed (hopefully) first.  (Since this is my first time writing an embed code, you may have to refresh the page to update the readings):

Here's an excerpt from the freaklabs article, link following:

Hacking a Geiger Counter 

in Nuclear Tokyo 

Thursday, 24 March 2011 

by Akiba, freaklabs.org

.... A horrible earthquake and tsunami occurred and along with all the destruction, it also caused a meltdown at a nuclear reactor near Tokyo. Since then, Tokyo has been suffering from nuclear fallout and tainted food and water. As of this post, we've just been informed that the tap water in Tokyo is tainted with radiation, there seems to have been a run on bottled water, and the situation is getting very disturbing (as if a nuclear meltdown in your backyard is not disturbing enough).

The day after the nuclear problems started occurring at the plant, geiger counters started popping up on Ustream. After that, Pachube set up special accounts for radiation data feeds in Japan (thank you Pachube). Unfortunately, geiger counters were sold out everywhere. The fear of nuclear disaster and radiation spread internationally and there was a run on geiger counters. Luckily, Tokyo Hackerspace was able to obtain two of them from Reuseum . They had actually bent over backwards getting them to us quickly and was calling their warehouse for stock and UPS and FedEx to see who would still deliver to Japan. We received them two days ago and I brought them to Tokyo Hackerspace yesterday to show people how to use it. We're keeping one at the space so that people can borrow it to check out their living area and reassure their families that its safe.....

Note the date.  They were calling it a meltdown on the 24th?!?



Be seeing you.