Google Releases Street View Images From Fukushima Ghost Town 63
mdsolar writes in with news that Goolge has released Street View pictures from inside the zone that was evacuated after the Fukushima disaster. "Google Inc. (GOOG) today released images taken by its Street View service from the town of Namie, Japan, inside the zone that was evacuated after the Fukushima nuclear disaster in March 2011. Google, operator of the world's biggest Web search engine, entered Namie this month at the invitation of the town's mayor, Tamotsu Baba, and produced the 360-degree imagery for the Google Maps and Google Earth services, it said in an e-mailed statement. All of Namie's 21,000 residents were forced to flee after the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami crippled the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant, about 8 kilometers (5 miles) from the town, causing the world's worst nuclear accident after Chernobyl. Baba asked Mountain View, California-based Google to map the town to create a permanent record of its state two years after the evacuation, he said in a Google blog post."
Direct link (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Unmanned car ? (Score:4, Informative)
Manned of course. The exclusion zone is not a 100% ban on all people and the radiation isn't even that bad. The highest dose experts (not TEPCO) predict a person would be subjected to is 20mSv/yr, 1/5th the dose that is known to possibly cause cancer, and about the same as a commercial pilot is expected to be exposed to.
It's easy enough to enter the exclusion zone and several photographers already have, they just haven't made the headlines on Slashdot because they took photos not a streetview.
Ghostery highscores... (Score:5, Informative)
The linked page on businessweek.com contains no less than 13 trackers:
ChartBeat
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Re:Unmanned car ? (Score:4, Informative)
About that, actually studies have quite consistently found airline crew annual exposure is around 2mSv/yr, see for example http://hps.org/publicinformation/ate/faqs/commercial flights.html. 20mSV is the absolute maximum annual dose that "should" be allowed for airline crew, while studies have found 20mSv is typical lifetime dose for airline crew.
There's better comparisons to put the dose rate in perspective though - for example, "Smoking an average of 1.5 packs per day gives a radiation dose of 60-160 mSv/year" (Wikipedia) while a CT-scan can give around 20mSv per examination http://www.radiologyinfo.org/en/safety/index.cfm?pg=sfty_xray - classified as "moderate" risk of developing cancer, as in 1 in 1000 to 1 in 500.
In this context of course none of this hardly matters - the Google driver isn't going to be spending an year there, and they're certainly not going to "internalize" most of that radiation. But it's very valid point for the prospect of people returning to Namie - the dose rates measured are taken at around waist height height where alpha and beta rays hardly even reach, indicating only external gamma ray dose. Those dose rates tell nothing about people who live, bathe and breathe in that isotope-soup. But currently, nobody lives in Namie and it's not know when, if ever, that can even be considered.