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In the weeks and months after the Fukushima nuclear disaster, a group of entrepreneurs, engineers, hackers and computer programmers formed Safecast and started constructing their own, crowdsourced Geiger counter. The device, and the power of crowd science, helped shed light on how serious the situation actually was.
Most of the damage caused by the Tohoku earthquake on March 11th, 2011 and subsequent tsunami’s up to 40-metre high wall of water was self-evident.
However, some very big unanswered questions remained. Several nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant been damaged. How seriously quickly became a question of contention, as did how much radioactive material had escaped – and where it had gone.
“We didn’t know if we, our family, friends, neighbours or for that matter people throughout Japan were safe. It was a difficult situation and the lack of trustworthy data made everything worse,” Peiter Franken, software engineer, entrepreneur and founding member of Safecast says.
The first concern was getting readings of radioactivity levels, and less than a week after what quickly became referred to simply as Fukushima, Safecast got their first data.
It was collected by a volunteer lorry driver. Equipped with a Geiger counter and a smart phone with GPS, he drove to the area around the Fukushima Daiichi plant, and collected data by stopping, taking measurements of radioactivity, as well as logging GPS data and taking pictures.
Less than a month later, Safecast headed out on what they refer to as ‘Drive 1’, collecting data from a modified Geiger counter hanging out a car window and attached to a computer inside where readings of radioactivity were constantly popping up on the screen.
Warp drive open design platform
Safecast grew out of a Skype group set up the day after Fukushima by three of the founders who wanted to share information about what was going on.
The group quickly grew to include engineers, programmers, scientists, hackers and activists, who in the middle of April 2011 met face-to-face for the first time in Tokyo.
The lack of reliable data led the group to agree on designing and building their own open source Geiger counter as the best way forward.
It was the birth of the ‘bGeigie’ Geiger counter.
The open source approach meant that the bGeige hit warp-drive levels very early on. The current version, the bGeigie Nano, is the seventh incarnation of the Geiger counter. That rivals the speed with which releases new versions of its iPhone. Almost.
The ‘bGeigie’ gathers radiation data every five seconds, along with GPS information. The data is stored on an SD card. All data is then uploaded to a central database that is connected to a map which graphs the radiation measurements.
It has been used to gather more than 40 million measurements of radiation levels across Japan, as well as to measure radiation levels in countries across every continent apart from Antarctica.
The non-linear fallout
Safecast’s data helped illustrate how the fallout from Fukushima far from followed a linear graph, where being further from the plant automatically meant being safer.
“One example was the first time we were allowed to measure within the 20 kilometre exclusion zone around the plant. We took measurements at a school that turned out to be lower than those taken by one of our volunteers on his own doorstep. He lives in Chiba, more than 200 kilometres south of Fukushima,” Pieter Franken says.
The bGeigie is a mobile device and allows for a level of data granularity that few other organisations, including official Japanese sources, can match. In one area, for example, government data comes from seven stationary devices. Safecast has taken around 800 measurements throughout the same area.
SafeCast is one of the few NGOs still collecting data, and recently got a grant to develop a second unit, which will measure air pollution.
“We have always maintained that we are neither for nor against nuclear power. I would say that we are ‘pro-data’ and ‘data-vists’. Our ideology is that data should be free and readily available to everyone. Perhaps that is part of the reason for our longevity,” Pieter Franken says.
Conflict breeds calibration
Today, both Safecast and government data show that radiation levels in and around Fukushima, as well as in other areas of Japan, are around half of what they were after the disaster.
The overlap in results has not always been the case throughout the last five years.
The at time insular nature of Japanese organisations, the desire to not report bad news to superiors or to lose face have all been cited as reasons why the initial response to the accident was marred by lack of information and refusal of acceptance of the results gathered by outside organisations.
Ironically, data from organisations like Safecast have helped restore faith in the government’s data.
After the accident, an anonymous individual set up a webpage, which collected and compared data gathered by NGOs like Safecast, as well as by the Japanese government. The site clearly shows how early data varied greatly depending on who collected it.
“This is perhaps one of the best results achieved by Safecast and other similar organizations. Their detailed data and the way that they over time seem to correspond better and better with government data has helped restore faith in the Japanese government's measurements," Ryugo Hayano, Professor of Nuclear Physics at Tokyo University and co-editor of the prestigious international journal Nuclear Physics A, says.
Keith Baverstock, Department of Environmental and Biological Sciences at the University of Eastern Finland, who has previously worked for the WHO's Regional Office for Europe as Regional advisor for ionising radiation and health, agrees that Safecast’s data has been a great help.
However, crucial information is still missing.
"There was a lack of critical data from the days just after the accident, due to the failure of the international emergency response system coordinated by the International Atomic Energy Agency. This data would have made it possible to give much more accurate predictions regarding the possible increase in future illnesses, like thyroid cancer, in people who were exposed to large amounts of radiation early on,” he says.
"Perhaps the greatest achievement of a group like Safecast is that its open source approach and systems like the bGeigie means that NGOs and the general public now have access to technology that enable them to immediately begin collecting data if a similar incident occurs. That is something, we have never had before."