I'm sitting in Tokyo right now working away on my codebase. No need to get worked up over nothing and so far it is nothing. A lot of my friends (mostly foreigners in Tokyo) are getting on trains out to Kyoto or Osaka. I think that's fine; maybe it's better to be safe than sorry. Maybe it's the cynical New Yorker in me but I feel like I've seen too many of these scares before. Sometimes you just have to turn off the TV/Twitter/whatever and get back to work.
Who knows, maybe in a few hours or days I'll be heading out too. I think it's unlikely. Right now, I don't think there's a need .
Not to say you should necessarily worry more yet, but just know that its not something that will sort itself out, it will require a solution.
Right now, from what I can read from Japanese news, and assuming the numbers given by the authority are accurate, there is no danger in Tokyo - 20 x normal is still below what's considered dangerous. What worrying about those numbers are not the number themselves, but what it means if the situation in the plants worsen - and I think people don't really know.
The Japanese gvt announced a couple of hours ago that every region in Japan will regularly update measure of radioactivity, which suggest that they don't try to hide too much, although I would not read too much into it either.
http://toshuo.com/2009/chronic-low-level-radiation-good-for-...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold_model#Contr...
That said the French Academy of Sciences & National Academy of Medicine did cite the exact same study of Taiwanese people as well as a large number of laboratory studies in its 2005 report that criticized the LNT model.
In any case I wouldn't be worried in the least if I were in Tokyo right now.
http://metropolis.co.jp/features/feature/searching-for-a-cur...
I wouldn't go to it... I think It's crazy. There's probably a good opportunity for research.
(source : http://www.niehs.nih.gov/health/docs/energy-good-bad.pdf)
Still, that's 175 plane rides from ontario to vancouver.
