We are in Fukushima prefecture. We wanted to see the effects of the Daichi plant meltdown for ourselves so we headed directly for the plant. I started my Geiger counter going a few days ago to get a baseline, and without that I don't think we would have done what we did.
On this map there is a flag on the plant itself, the blue line is our track, and the grey circles are guarded gates around the exclusion zone. The pink area is the official exclusion zone.
The Geiger counter was very interesting! Here are the readings I got, travelling clockwise. The unit is counts per minute(CPM). Most of the readings were taken over 10mins.
Baseline taken in the Alps: 13 CPM
Food bought in Fukushima prefecture but 70km from the reactors :14 CPM
@70km from reactors: 13 CPM
@ 50km from Reactors 34 CPM
@ 35 km: 31.5 CPM
@ 33.8km: At first exclusion gate: 58.1 CPM
@ 33.1 km, 2nd exclusion gate:139.7 CPM
@ 34.4 km 3rd gate: 223.8 CPM
@ 34.3 km 4th gate: 2 readings: 282.7 CPM, 298 CPM
@30.3 km, 5th gate: 250.8 CPM
@ 29.4 km,gate6 : 202.5 CPM
That is the highest count we got was 23 times background! The Geiger counter was firing off continuously, just like in the movies!
There appears to be a gated exclusion zone, where residents and officials are allowed in, in white paper overalls and wearing paper masks. They are bussed in and the driver waits outside the zone with his bus to bring them back.
Some of the gates have guards, others are just locked and have surveillance cameras on them.
Here is the proof we got into the exclusion zone....Joe has his foot under the gate!
There is also a much wider zone which is deserted! There are no people or animals in the houses, and no lights on. The rice paddies are defunct, animal sheds empty. The gardens are tended though, so we guess the owners are allowed back from time to time. We don't how wide this zone is. Some cars were left in this zone, possibly because the owners had nowhere in their new residences to park them? There were no cars on the streets.
Farm machinery has just been left.
Beautiful expensive houses abandoned, rice paddies going wild, hot houses just left empty. Some of the hot houses had crops in them, gone brown and dry.
Driving through this deserted area felt surreal. It was just as you would imagine the place would look after a nuclear fall out, or an Ebola pandemic -all of the people gone, but houses left as they were. We thought of the anguish the residents must have felt (still feel) when they were told they couldn't stay, couldn't produce food in these areas. The feeling for us was very sad.
Roads are not being repaired. Grass is growing in the cracks in the bitumen.
The only people in this area were workers, and what they ewe doing was obvious. There were teams doing radioactivity readings, and others doing remedial work. They were removing all of the mulch and soil down to a depth of about 1meter! The soil was bagged up. Trucks seemed to be taking the soil TOWARDS the exclusion zone. I suppose that makes sense!
Everybody was wearing face masks, and many were wearing the white paper overalls.
We kept driving towards the plant. It is south of Fukushima City. We kept driving closer from the north along the coast, expecting to find a road block. The Geiger counter was showing normal readings even after we passed through the 20 km exclusion zone we have heard about. But from 20km out there were no people. After dark there were no lights in the houses or businesses.
We were finally stopped just 6.6 kms from the plant. From here on it was permits only and we were turned back. They were checking every car going in. We guessed that these were workers going to the plant.
The spread of the radioactivity was to the northwest, with the prevailing breeze. Very fortunately that area is sparsely populated. If the wind had been different the highly populated coastal strip could have been affected. Apparently judging by our readings this area was not affected at all.
The impact on Japan of the plant meltdown has been immense! The gated exclusion area is around 1/5 of the width of the country in that northwesterly direction.
And of course they were coping with the Tsunami at the same time -but that's another story!
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