{"id":7123,"date":"2011-03-18T13:04:19","date_gmt":"2011-03-18T20:04:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/traveljapanblog.com\/wordpress\/?p=7123"},"modified":"2011-04-26T09:28:33","modified_gmt":"2011-04-26T16:28:33","slug":"radiation-or-not-in-nikko","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/traveljapanblog.com\/wordpress\/2011\/03\/radiation-or-not-in-nikko\/","title":{"rendered":"Radiation (or not) in Nikko"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Nikko, Japan is about halfway between Tokyo and Fukushima (home of the now infamous nuclear power plant). I’ve already mentioned how radiation levels in Tokyo haven’t changed<\/a> much since March’s earthquake and tsunami off the coast of Sendai. But what about Nikko?<\/p>\n

Nikko is in Tochigi Prefecture which borders Fukushima Prefecture. Tochigi Prefecture has seven Geiger counters set up with frequent updates of radiation counts. You can find them here<\/a>. As of April 26, 2011, the top reading is .19 microsievert per hour and the average of the seven readings around the prefecture is .08 microsievert per hour. So is that good news or bad news? I guess that depends on who you are. If you are the media trying to scare people, it is very bad news indeed. Perhaps that’s why the media isn’t mentioning actual radiation readings in Japan. <\/p>\n

You’ll get more radiation in most places in the USA (especially if you live at a high altitude, which is still quite a safe thing to do) than you will traveling in Japan right now, even to places fairly close to Fukushima. (In the USA, the average for Americans is more than 3X this number<\/a>. Due to large amounts of thorium in the soil, places in Brazil and India can average more than 3 microsieverts an hour.)<\/p>\n

Today’s photo is Toshogu in Nikko. If it wasn’t for all the radiation I would get by flying on a jet to Japan, I’d go back to Nikko for spring break. Just kidding. It wouldn’t be the radiation from flying (which would be far more than the radiation I would get on the ground in Japan) that would keep me from visiting Japan. I actually checked flight prices and they weren’t good. The foreigners “escaping” Japan are keeping round-trip ticket prices high right now. Ironically, people leaving Japan are taking on more radiation on those flights out of Japan than they would be by staying.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nikko, Japan is about halfway between Tokyo and Fukushima (home of the now infamous nuclear power plant). I’ve already mentioned how radiation levels in Tokyo haven’t changed much since March’s earthquake and tsunami off the coast of Sendai. But what about Nikko? Nikko is in Tochigi Prefecture which borders Fukushima Prefecture. Tochigi Prefecture has seven […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5],"tags":[258,284],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/traveljapanblog.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7123"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/traveljapanblog.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/traveljapanblog.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/traveljapanblog.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/traveljapanblog.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7123"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/traveljapanblog.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7123\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7353,"href":"https:\/\/traveljapanblog.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7123\/revisions\/7353"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/traveljapanblog.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/traveljapanblog.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/traveljapanblog.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}