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Watching the Iodine fly overhead

Two wonderful charts from the University of Washington:

Air Radioactivity Monitoring at UW Physics
The Japanese earthquake and tsunami caused a severe event at the Fukushima Nuclear Plant. At the University of Washington Physics Department we rapidly adapted one of our basic research labs to monitor for the arrival of trace amounts of fission products produced at Fukushima. On Friday, March 18, we detected the first trace amounts of radioactive isotopes from Fukushima in Seattle. We stress that the overall amount of the radioactivity is extremely low, at least thousands of times below EPA limits. For all of the details, see our recent article on the arXiv!

Air activity and spectral view of just the Iodine-131

The actual units are far far below what is even considered worth a raised eyebrow but it is still interesting to track the flow. More information and data at the UW website. Posted by DaveH at April 10, 2011 5:34 PM