Fukishima fall-out fears as DOUBLE the normal amount of radiation is found in Missouri snow and San Francisco beach busts safety levels prompting investigation

Tuesday, January 7, 2014

Fukishima fall-out fears as DOUBLE the normal amount of radiation is found in Missouri snow and San Francisco beach busts safety levels prompting investigation

Double: Radiation counts per minute (CPM) taken in the snow this week in St Louis, Missouri, show levels double the normal numbers

A San Francisco beach has five times the safe level fueling concerns over Fukushima's impact
The findings - reaching over 150 micro-REM per hour - prompted federal officials to launch an investigation
Officials said they were 'befuddled'
Snow in Missouri has been found to contain double the normal radiation amount
In September, a BBC report said radiation readings around the Fukushima power plant were 18 times higher than previously reported

By Marie-louise Olson
PUBLISHED: 01:47 EST, 7 January 2014 | UPDATED: 04:52 EST, 7 January 2014
A beach in San Francisco contains five times the safe levels of radiation fueling concerns that Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant’s crisis is impacting areas across the country.
It comes just days after radiation readings were found to be double the normal amount in Missouri's recent snowfall.
According to YouTube user, DutchSinse, who posted a video of him taking the Geiger readings in St Louis, the findings mean that ‘small particles of radioactive material are indeed coming down in the precipitation. Past tests show around 30CPM in the same spot on a nice day with no precipitation’.

Source: Could Fukushima's ongoing crisis be the reason the US is experiencing abnormally high radiation levels?

Dangerous: A beach in San Francisco contains five times the safe levels of radiation. In this picture the radiation device is in the foreground with the beach in the background

Higher near the water: Once the man approaches the water itself, the radiation spikes to at least 500 per cent safe levels

Officials reject concerns over 500 percent radiation increase on California beach

Published time: January 06, 2014 17:22
Edited time: January 07, 2014 15:10

AFP Photo / Spencer Platt

Health officials in California are now telling residents not to worry after a video uploaded to the internet last month seemed to show high levels of radiation at a Pacific Coast beach.
The video, “Fukushima radiation hits San Francisco,” has been viewed nearly half-a-million times since being uploaded to YouTube on Christmas Eve, and its contents have caused concern among residents who fear that nuclear waste from the March 2011 disaster in Japan may be arriving on their side of the Pacific Ocean.
Throughout the course of the seven-minute-long clip, a man tests out his Geiger counter radiation detector while walking through Pacifica State Beach outside of San Francisco. At times, the monitor on the machine seems to show radiation of 150 counts-per-minute, or the equivalent of around five times what is typically found in that type of environment.
After the video began to go viral last month, local, state and federal officials began to investigate claims that waste from the Fukushima nuclear plant has washed ashore in California. Only now, though, are authorities saying that they have no reason to believe that conditions along the West Coast are unsafe.
The Half Moon Bay Review reported on Friday that government officials conducted tests along California’s Pacific Coast after word of the video began to spread online, but found no indication that radiation levels had reached a hazardous point.
“It’s not something that we feel is an immediate public health concern,” Dean Peterson, the county environmental health director, told the Review. “We’re not even close to the point of saying that any of this is from Fukushima.”

Screenshot from YouTube user Kill0Your0TV

According to the Review’s Mark Noack, counts-per-minute does indeed measure radiation, but “does not directly equate to the strength or its hazard level to humans.” And while the paper has reported that testing conducted by Peterson’s department on their own Geiger counters has since revealedradiation level of about 100 micro-REM per hour, or about five times the normal amount, officials are confident that there is nothing to be concerned about.

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