One of the reasons I haven't been running around like the sky is falling over Fukushima is that number of private geiger detectors in the US. Government official can say what they want, but if a radiation spike happens in the U.S. its going to be hard to hide. According to the folks running RadiationNetwork
Early Friday morning (June 10, 2011), at about 3:00 A.M. local time, one of our new Monitoring Stations in Hawaii broadcast a Radiation Alert over the network, reaching a sustained level of over 100 CPM (Counts per Minute) for a period of about 15 minutes, peaking as high as 141 CPM at one point. The readings then subsided to normal background levels of about 37 CPM for that station, but within less than 2 hours, trended quickly up again to over 100 CPM for another 5 minutes or so.
Hawaii News Daily
This is the first noticable spike reported by RadiationNetwork on U.S. territory. Unfortunately, radiationnetwork does not provide details on the radioactive particles causing the event. A jumpt caused by relatively short lived radioactive iodine is going to be less of a concern than one caused by longer lived isotopes.
Just to remind folks where things stand in Fukushima right now:
The nuclear fuel in three of the reactors at the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant has melted through the base of the pressure vessels and is pooling in the outer containment vessels, according to a report by the Japanese government.
Meanwhile the Japanese government has admitted to large release of radiation than previously reported:
In early April, the agency said some 370,000 terabecquerels escaped from the facility. It now believes that figure was 770,000 terabecquerels. One terabecquerel is a trillion becquerels, the standard measure of radiation, while the permissible level of iodine-131 for vegetables and fish is 2,000 becquerels per kilogram.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/...
While a single radiation spike should not throw the people of Hawaii or the west coast of the U.S. into a panic, the radiation network warning level does indicate radiation levels several times higher than normal. This is a time where we should, all, insist on timely and accurate information from the EPA's RadNet (seperate from radiationnetwork) rendered in an easily understandable form.