Generating and viewing your local radiation related graphs on the web

[drlava]

I'm sure everyone here is aware of and has been following the events that have happened in Japan recently. During work breaks, reading various discussions has been an enjoyable and educational pastime. I recently discovered a D-I-Y local radiation plotting tool provided by the EPA. As an engineer and researcher, I love data, and thought some of you might get a kick out of it, too. If the "U.S. west coast radiation increase is extremely low" level of popular reporting isn't doing it for you, you can see for yourself JUST HOW LOW it is here.

Go to the EPA rad-net page here

1) scroll to the bottom and click a mark of a location you are interested in, and look to the right of the map for the FixedMonitorLocation that is identifies. Do not click 'Show detail' because that will only give you one time sample.

2) click 'Query view' at the top left of the page in the left nav bar and select your desired fixed monitor location in the scrolling list box in the second row.

3) select some parameters of interest from the upper left list box such as gamma and beta count rate, and click 'submit' at the bottom

4) from the results screen, you can either download the data as XL spreadsheet for plotting, or select 'Measurement End Date/Time' for the x-axis column and your desired reading for the y-axis column and hit 'scatter plot'



Enjoy!

[JohnYayas]

You'll get more radiation from a day on the beach in Brazil than that stuff coming from Japan.

[Xytrell]

Or even from a banana.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BED

[dnar]

Or from living in a brick house.

[JohnYayas]

Didn't know that about the banana. But once I had to go into a reactor compartment to do some soldering and used up my entire quarter years worth of exposure in 1 hr. Being the nice guys that the Navy are, they extended my limit so that I could still go down into the engine room to stand watch.