With all the attention to the nuclear crisis in Fukushima, Japan, there has been a lot of chatter about local radiation leaks and their potential spread beyond the Fukushima plant.
The good news is that at present, this is mostly just chatter and there is no evidence that people outside the immediate perimeter of the plant need to flee.
Still, many would like to have the app that will send you mobile alerts when radiation levels begin to rise in areas surrounding your own, provide you with the fastest escape route, and help you book the cheapest airline tickets to safety. We are not quite there yet, although such such a service will probably be ready in time for the next nuclear or bio-hazard crisis. (Note: Fukushima residents can sign-up via mobile for mobile alerts about nuclear radiation emergencies).
In the meantime, there are a handful of authoritative sites that offer radiation level monitoring data both for Japan and the US, searchable by location, and accessible by mobile phone.
For the status in Japan, a few official sites give easy mobile access in both English and Japanese, as well as Korean and Chinese:
http://notice.yahoo.co.jp/emg/en/archives/np_jp.html
http://eq.sakura.ne.jp/
http://eq.wide.ad.jp/
The latest radiation readings for the Tokyo area are provided by the Tokyo government in English, and in a “feature phone-friendly” format.
Apart from these sites, which are provided in compact HTML, the rest of the best live data is accessible via smartphones, and in the case of flash-based sites, via PC/Web browsers.
For an all-Japan overview of radiation levels, you can check the NISA (Nuclear Information and Safety Agency) website for the latest news releases and updated maps (such as this one for March 20), but the site does not offer a live monitoring dashboard.
There are a number of live radiation monitoring dashboards maintained locally by individual prefectures. Some of these resources are really impressive, such as the Shizuoka Hamaoka Nuclear Power Station in Maezaki City – complete with images showing the placement of each plant reactor, and allows you to filter separately for a wide range of outputs, including gas, radiation, power, etc. This flashy part of the site is, however, Flash based, so you will need a PC or compatible device to view it. However, Shizuoka does offer the latest radiation measurement levels accessible via mobile phone in Japanese, with PDF-formatted data that can be opened by most standard Japanese feature phones.
Shizuoka Hamaoka Plant Monitoring Map
Almost all prefectures maintain simple mobile sites and are updating them for emergency purposes, but these sites (such as the Ibaraki mobile site) do not include all links to the latest nuclear radiation monitoring data for their area.
One site has aggregated diverse data from around the country onto a single web page at Pow-Source.com/311, which offers a useful snapshot and various maps of the radiation levels around Japan.
For people worrying about radiation drifting westward to the continental US, you can check the EPA Radnet site, which features live radiation monitoring data from key points around the country. Unlike Japan, it offers a convenient one-stop data server for the entire country, although at present it can only be accessed by smartphone or PC browsers, and you cannot yet sign up for alerts.
But for now, you can just lean back and check the latest radiation stats on your mobile. Despite all the hype, there seems to be no indication that radioactivity levels are rising outside the immediate area of the Fukushima plant. In fact, the standard background radiation seems higher in West LA than in Tokyo, although both are thousands of times lower than levels believed to be hazardous to human health.
