Japanese are repeating substitution because they can’t evacuate.
After 311, geiger counter has become an everyday word like rice or soap. When the atmospheric dose was the highest in last March, most of the people didn’t have geiger contour yet. However, now amateur citizens and people who were involved in other academic field are measuring radiation level and analyze food by investing so much into equipment.
Now it’s not rare for a person to have more than 2 dosemeters. Actually, each dosemeter has its unique feature. Some show higher radiation than others or some represent the radiation level faster than others. It’s not also rare for a person to have an analyzing program attached to their PC or smart phone.
However, it’s a substitution reaction for not being able to fulfill their hope -evacuation-.
Whether it is true or not, they think evacuation costs. They chose to protect themselves and their family. However, there remains the question if they can really save their family by measuring around.
Actually, it is easy to analyze cesium or strontium, but it’s almost impossible for an amateur to analyze alpha nuclides such as plutonium or uranium. They also need to analyze tritium which may be contained in tap water. If it’s in tap water, it’s very risky to have shower or cook with tap water.
However, these nuclides are ignored because they don’t want to know. Even if they find it in their surroundings, they can’t do anything so they don’t want to know if it’s beside themselves.
In this hopeless situation in Japan, those people are struggling to have the feeling that they take control over the situation, otherwise they may go panic.
It’s easy to criticize their endless measurement as neurotic, but this is their only way to stay sane.
Their analysis is actually useful for some people to know how much contaminated milk is or a city area is. However, it can mislead people if they say this is how you can remove cesium from food etc because they are ignoring the inconvenient truth.
They claim they need money to evacuate. They also say they need to be able to speak foreign languages, but I have the feeling that even if they have 5 billion yen, they won’t evacuate. What they actually need might be a mental support of professional psychologists.
Iori Mochizuki