Digital Designs and Scientific Hardware - Open-Source Lab: How to Build Your Own Hardware and Reduce Research Costs - page 212

FIGURE 6.55 Fully assembled Geiger counter.
For such projects, a major impetus was to help people in Japan to measure the levels of ra-
diation in their everyday lives after the unfortunate earthquake and tsunami struck in March
2011 and caused nuclear radiation leakages in Fukushima. Due largely to conflicts of interest,
the official announcements of nuclear accidents are viewed as unreliable by much of the pub-
lic. 53 For example, during the Fukushima disaster, the Japanese public found official reports
extremely dubious and government officials appeared to be actively preventing citizens from
obtaining data [ 29 ] . Even in the United States, our government appeared reluctant to post on-
line whatever radiation levels they were monitoring as radiation from Fukushima hit the West
Coast, and there were several reports that their monitors crashed [ 30 ] . A response from citizen
scientists in Japan was to crowd-source radiation Geiger counter readings from across their
country using a collection of both OSH and open-source software [ 31 ] as can be seen in the
Japan Geigermap: at-a-glance both then ( Figure 6.56 ) and now ( Figure 6.57 ) .