If a new Kickstarter project gets funded, Japanese citizens will soon have access to radiation data by, for, and of the people.
Building on other crowdsourced radiation maps, a volunteer team is trying to assemble a network of up to 600 geiger counters that will provide independent measurements of radiation in Japan. Citizen scientists would be responsible for setting up and monitoring the stations, but that data would be fed back to RDTN.org.
The accident at the Fukushima nuclear plant has highlighted the trust gap that exists between official data sources and people. It was apparent after Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and in dozens of smaller incidents that people just don't know if they can believe the radiation measurements coming from governments or the entities who run nuclear reactors.
In the past, there was no way to systematically build a citizen scientific network that could provide a check for official numbers. But now there is.
RDTN is running a Kickstarter micropatronage campaign to raise the $33,000 necessary to purchase 100 geiger counters, which would jumpstart the network. So far, 21 backers have contributed $2,125, but they've got 26 days left to reach their goal.
"This site is not meant as a replacement for government nor official nuclear agencies," RDTN notes on its website. "Our hope is that data sets from various sources can provide additional context to the official word in these rapidly changing events."
Really, what a citizen science effort like this could add is trust in or skepticism about the data provided by official sources. And as sociologist Zeynep Tufekci noted last month, it's institutions we can trust that has stalemated our nuclear question.