IWAKI, Japan — Kiyoko Okoshi had a simple goal when she spent about $625 for a dosimeter: she missed her daughter and grandsons and wanted them to come home.
Local officials kept telling her that their remote village was safe, even though it was less than 20 miles from the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. But her daughter remained dubious, especially since no one from the government had taken radiation readings near their home.
So starting in April, Mrs. Okoshi began using her dosimeter to check nearby forest roads and rice paddies. What she found was startling. Near one sewage ditch, the meter beeped wildly, and the screen read 67 microsieverts per hour, a potentially harmful level. Mrs. Okoshi and a cousin who lives nearby worked up the courage to confront elected officials, who did not respond, confirming their worry that the government was not doing its job.
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Although dosimeter measurements taken by amateurs are considered crude because they measure only one kind of radiation emission and do not account for how long a person may have been exposed to it, Mr. Sato suspected that Mrs. Okoshi’s fears were founded after he saw a map of airborne and soil readings made by the United States Department of Energy and the Japanese government. It, too, is relatively basic, but it showed a patch of bright yellow right over her village of Shidamyo, an indicator of high levels of the radioactive isotopes cesium 134 and cesium 137.
The councilman, in turn, recruited Shinzo Kimura, the radiation expert who quit the Health Ministry. Mr. Kimura has since done extensive testing to see if Mrs. Okoshi’s readings were right. He says they are — and that is bad news.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/01/world/asia/01radiation.html
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