Suggestion - Go to Tokyo, measure radiation, continue on to Fukushima

Hey UCB students. Rather than sit in the ivory tower, now is a great time to go on a field trip to Tokyo and environs. Why sit thousands of miles away, measuring tiny bits of radiation, when you can go to Tokyo, and measure more directly, what you consider to be the negligible effects of fallout?

You should get your advisor to pay (although if his grant money is tied to the NRC, you might have to fund your trip another way).

It would be a great chance to see firsthand what is actually happening. You can blog about your trip.

If you find that you are, in fact, wrong, and that TEPCO has consistently covered things up, well no worries, you'll get some firsthand information about the trouble of cleaning up slowly leaking radiation that has no obvious way of stopping.

I guarantee technology that helps cleaning things up will be a good way to hedge your college degree. If people decide to live with the lights turned off (as they are now doing in Germany), you can use your knowledge to help clean up the dozens of reactors that will be failing on the east coast in the next decade (we don't have any money to maintain these, so we know they are going to have an increasing number of failures).

If you're right you can glibly pronounce all is well in the kingdom of nuclear fission energy. If you're wrong, no harm, at least you know the truth and can use your knowledge to adapt to the future, since eventually the truth will escape the land of the rising sun.