Comparing Maine Radiation to Idaho.

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I’ve been looking for a good way to monitor radiation in Maine since I realized the EPA is up to several weeks behind in reporting radiation levels.  It isn’t paranoia, it’s just reasonable to want data in real-time, sort of like finding out today that it’s going to be raining rather than waiting two weeks for the weatherman to let you know.  It’s too late at that point to plan for a picnic. 

So the EPA website has a map.  If you enlarge the map, you can click on individual states and individual sites.  Maine has two sites, Orono and Portland.  Both show very little activity, which makes me feel pretty good. 

But I got to thinking.  What is going to show up as a major spike?  So I went looking at Boise, Idaho’s graph for the same period.  The jump in rain radioactivity didn’t show up at all. 

Ok, not such a good result.  Then I went looking for the information on specific days for Maine.  Guess what?  We don’t appear anywhere on the specific day listings.  In fact, the EPA isn’t listing anything from New England in terms of air radiation on their day-to-day recording.  All we’ve got is a bunch of jiggling graphs.  I know we’re a less populous state, but we’ve got almost as many people as Nevada, right?  (They’ve actually got twice as many people, yikes.)  Shouldn’t we merit at least a mention?  And Boston was, last time I checked, pretty populous.  I’m not sure what’s going on over at the EPA.  Can someone check the listed states with Red vs. Blue states?  Maybe if we voted wrong we don’t get real-time radiation monitoring or something.

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