Are you living in radiation? How reliable are these websites?

[BADecker]

As cellphone and microwave usage increase, radiation from these devices increases as well.

There are those that think that the bees are dying off en masse because of cellphone usage.

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[tvbcof]

Just a little note for anyone who is interested.

When Fukushima happened, it was fairly quickly obvious to me that we could not rely on info coming from the various governments.  At all.  I reserched things a bit and found several things:

  1) The 'safe' levels set prior to Fukushima of various types of radiological threats tended to be absurdly low for a variety of political reasons (which I had already suspected.)

  2) A typical 'Gieger counter' was fairly useless for measuring anything but fairly significant threats such as a nuclear weapon relatively close to one's locale.

I bought some dated equipment which I felt would be adequate to identify potential threats of significance.  Specifically, a buildup in particuar foods.  I then learned how to use it well enough to feel reasonably comproftable with the results.  I bought what is known as a 'scaler' rather than a single or multi-channel analyzer because I felt that I would have a pretty good idea of the actual types and ratios of isotopes which were of potential threat and did not need to be able to identify them.  For detectors I use what are know as 'scintilators' which are more applicable for the type of testing I wished to do.

I can report that on the West Coast around the Bay Area, in the months following the event, I was not able to identify anything which caused ME any concern.  Near the time when we would have achieved the hightest fall-out of elements such as cesium and strontium I blended up a bunch of grass clipings and tested them extensively with no significant results that caused me concern.  I also was shopping at an Asian food market since my girlfriend did the cooking and never found anything of note.

I expect that we all got a few 'fuel fleas' which are relatively large particals which can lodge in the lungs and emit alpha particals (among other things.)  Alpha is not normally a big cause for concern because of the very limited penetrating power, but if it gets inside of tissue in 'island sized' chunks, it can be a real problem.  Something exploded and scattered fuel rods around the site but the how and what has still not been fessed up to as far as I know.  There will likely be an increase in cancer rates over the next generation due to this, but on an individual level the risk is not great.  As I read things.  What's done is done anyway.

Of course the land around Fukushima and the ocean in the immediate vacinity is highly damaged.  Although I subscribe to the 'big ocean' philosphy, to this day I don't eat a lot of tuna fish or other wide ranging long lived predator fish just in case an individual fish happened to be feeding downstream of some of this.  More than that, though, I don't care for it all that much.  I've not broken out my test equipement in years.

Note that my gear was never formally calibrated and I am a novice with no formal training.  I'm simply an interested in this stuff and have zero confidence that out government would weigh the protection of the citizens above the protection of corporate and international interests.

tl;dr:  I have confidence that these monitoring networks are reasonably accurate and certainly 'better than nothing' (which is what we get from the state/media), but the results are meaningless and have yet to indicate a notable threat.  They did show some interesting artifacts for about a week when the very short lived xenon was expected following the Fukushima disaster.  My read.

[Balthazar]

Yep, it's always very funny to see how somebody is trying to measure something with geiger counter.

Typical values of volume activity for foods are too low to be distinguished from the background, even if this particular food samples were grown in a close neighbourhood of exploded nuclear reactor. Note for everybody, you wouldn't be able to measure foods activity without something like scintillation spectrometer, shielded with 10-20cm of lead. It's like an attempt to see a lighted candle on the background of sun disk in the middle of day. Just don't waste your time, you won't get any sane results.

P.S. It also explains why sometimes it's relatively safe to eat the polluted food, like some tourists are doing in Chernobyl exclusion zone. Simply because they aren't doing that on the regular basis.

[Nemo1024]

Nevertheless, if one want to have a radiation meter (and a nitrate tester), I can recommend one from SOEKS (short for Contemporary Ecological Systems):

http://soeks.ru/catalog/soeks_ekotester_2

The system is bi-lingual - menus are in Russian and English.

And an EMF tester as a bonus:
http://soeks.ru/catalog/impuls

[luciann]

As cellphone and microwave usage increase, radiation from these devices increases as well.

There are those that think that the bees are dying off en masse because of cellphone usage.

Bees are dying, but its not due to radiation.

Its due to a different level of breed of bees that kill the queen bee taking over certain hives.

Theres a whole documentary on this, esp why we need them. Its on netflix just type in bee documentary. It goes onto a detail of things, buts it not radiation or cell phones.

[Balthazar]

Africanized bees aka so-called "killer bees" are not a problem, actually. Yes, they're more protective and sometimes aggressive, but these bees are also superior honey producers. Africanized bees are also more resistant to parasites, virus infections and other deseases. That's why so many beekeepers are switching from european strains to africanized bees. By the way, despite having the superior genes, these bees are too dependent on food, so they aren't capable of establishing stable presence in areas with too cold or too dry climate.

P. S. It appears like bees are dying as the result of poisoning. A lot of various indiscriminative insecticides are being used by monsanto & others, including those with a delayed effect.

[tvbcof]

Africanized bees aka so-called "killer bees" are not a problem, actually. Yes, they're more protective and sometimes aggressive, but these bees are also superior honey producers. Africanized bees are also more resistant to parasites, virus infections and other deseases. That's why so many beekeepers are switching from european strains to africanized bees. By the way, despite having the superior genes, these bees are too dependent on food, so they aren't capable of establishing stable presence in areas with too cold or too dry climate.

P. S. It appears like bees are dying as the result of poisoning. A lot of various indiscriminative insecticides are being used by monsanto & others, including those with a delayed effect.

A friend of mine has family in the bee business.  Says that people used to transport bees across the rocky mountains.  California bees do not produce healthy or survivable hives any more.  Those who still do operate on both sides keep the California bees seperate from the other ones.  This is here-say, but I have confidence in what the guy says and his family is pretty big in the business.  Seems to be a pretty widely held belief that something is going wrong and it is especially true of California's central valley.

The same area has also been under a pretty funny drought, and in the Northern reaches around Shasta people are complaining bitterly about 'chemtrails'.  Here on the North side of the ridge (between CA and OR) we had unusually dry weather (very nice in fact) and a fair bit of interesting artifacts in the skies until about a year ago when things seemed to have gotten back to clouds of the type I remember as a kid and we had a typical rainy shitty winter.

Hard to know what is happening in CA, but one can guess that small-timer are not going to be able to sustian half a decade of mis-fortune and will probably be selling their property.  I'll guess that there will be plenty of multi-national corporate buyers, and they'll be well served by fire-sale prices.  The drought also allowed Gov Brown to implement a lot of water regulations, apps developers developed water snitch applications, etc.  Just sayin'

[TECSHARE]

Why is that?

Because it's a pure BS. There is no actual difference between chanting "allahu akbar" or pushing some anti-nuclear propaganda. Both are nothing but a result of ignorance.

If you do some research on the Pacific you will see it is largely a dead zone now with thousands of sea creatures washing up on beaches and almost no visible life in many areas.

If you do some research then you will see that these "elevated levels" are nothing but a joke in comparison with a natural radiation background in many populated areas of the world. And even more funny, natural radiation is provided mostly by the alpha emitters, which are dozens of times more hazardous for your health than all these anthropohenic beta- and gamma-emitters.

with thousands of sea creatures washing up on beaches

Isn't connected with radiation levels. You're welcome to prove otherwise.

Sorry but the threat of nuclear reactors failing and or melting down is a very real factual threat, not equivalent to believing in magic sky men. Especially so in the USA where the vast majority of reactors are way past their designed lifetime and simply keep getting a pass for economic reasons. Many of them are leaking and breaking down. Fukushima has shown us that something as simple as an extended power outage can cause a meltdown. Those same reactor designs are all over the USA, using dangerous MOX fuel which contains plutonium which is way more dangerous than any of the other materials commonly used in nuclear plants in fuel rods. I am not completely anti-nuclear energy, but we most certainly could be using newer technology which will not melt down simply because of loss of power, and can cool down on its own using the laws of physics without human intervention.

As far as your point about elevated levels of radiation, that is a blanket statement which might cover some but certainly not all instances. Some are in fact quite serious and are a real threat to human life and health. As far as evidence of radiation causing the Pacific Ocean die off, that's kind of hard when they are systematically shutting down testing by the universities and independent labs, and the fact that the US government doesn't even monitor radiation levels in the ocean, only fresh water. Every nuclear disaster in history is followed by as much of a coverup as they can get away with. Nuclear energy is big money. REALLY big money. Not just that it provides cover for nuclear weapons production, so the military industrial complex has a stake in keeping it going as well. Unfortunately a lot more people are going to die for that money, probably even the psychopaths in charge of them.

[Balthazar]

Africanized bees aka so-called "killer bees" are not a problem, actually. Yes, they're more protective and sometimes aggressive, but these bees are also superior honey producers. Africanized bees are also more resistant to parasites, virus infections and other deseases. That's why so many beekeepers are switching from european strains to africanized bees. By the way, despite having the superior genes, these bees are too dependent on food, so they aren't capable of establishing stable presence in areas with too cold or too dry climate.

P. S. It appears like bees are dying as the result of poisoning. A lot of various indiscriminative insecticides are being used by monsanto & others, including those with a delayed effect.

A friend of mine has family in the bee business.  Says that people used to transport bees across the rocky mountains.  California bees do not produce healthy or survivable hives any more.  Those who still do operate on both sides keep the California bees seperate from the other ones.  This is here-say, but I have confidence in what the guy says and his family is pretty big in the business.  Seems to be a pretty widely held belief that something is going wrong and it is especially true of California's central valley.

I think they were talking about CCD i.e. colony collapse disorder, which is also known as disappearing disease. It's a serious problem since many of crops are pollinated by honey bees. It can be caused by parasites, such as Varroa destructor, which is currently considered as world's most destructive honey bee killer since it was detected in more than 80% of cases. It is a common problem for all races, and africanized bees are no more resistant than other subspecies of honey bee.

Fortunately, there are some strains which are more resistant than others. For example, russian honey bees are resistant to infestations by this parasite.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_honey_bee

Though they are still affected by the Israeli acute paralysis virus, insecticides, pesticides, GMO foods and other harmful factors.

[NeuroticFish]

From what I see Cernobyl is safe, right? No danger in Ukraine.

Something is deffinitely wrong with those maps you showed...