Radioactivity

I think its clear to everybody living in Moscow, that this is a pretty unhealthy city. Polution levels are unbelieably hight. I actually stopped running or any other outdoor sport activities within the city, since it will just fill my lungs with even more dust and poluted air.

You don’t even need to read the charts. Its just enough, if you clean your windows or dust off your funiture and you’ll see what’s in the air. But what about the stuff that you don’t see? What about radiation?

Last years summer fires also called up Greenpeace in Russia, warning that there are also fires burning in areas, which are still contaminated from the Chernobyl catastrophy and that some smoke will bring radiactive particles to Moscow. Only 6 months later, AFP reports that the Fukushima blast radiation finally arrived in Moscow (though they say the levels are not dangerous for your health).

Thank god we hae the Internet on our hands and we can just read up and get all informations by ourselves these days, so we don’t have to rely on misleading information provided by governments and corporations, protecting their own interests. So I did a little research on radiation levels in Russia, mainly to find infomation about Moscow and I found some pretty interesting sites.

One of them was created to show radiation meassurements of private people. The makers wanted to show radiation levels in the far East, close to Korea and Japan, after the Fukushima incident. Surprisingly people across Russia measured radiation and now the map shows levels from all kinds of areas, including Moscow. Some of the areas have high levels, due to past accidents and polution.

Here is some more info on it from Global Voices.

Its interesting to cross reference this map against the map and list of radiation sources and accidents of Globalsecurity.org and it helps to explain elevated leves in some Russian cities and regions.