There are some absurdly high counts there.

Station ID 5:920 Fresno, CA, US
CPM: current 565 Low 242 High 992
Average 389, Deviation 101.9
(CPM of Gamma in energy range 600-800keV)
Last updated: 2013-12-16 05:52:00 GMT-0600

You have a good point! Clearly the people in St. George Utah are concerned about their EPA stations rise (see article link below) but you would think this Fresno California station would cause some locals to question it too.

http://www.stgeorgeutah.com/news/archive/2013/12/15/sh-website-issues-radiation-high-alert-for-st-george-authorities-question-findings/

Fear of the unknown with no justification? Who is this guy? I would love to see some mass spectrometer data to show what radionuclides are being detected.

@Morellio - The counts I posted above are from channel 5 of the EPA's gamma station in Fresno, CA, U.S.

If you disagree with that data, please feel free to check it out on the EPA's official RADNET site or call the EPA about it.

I would certainly like to check the site out just to see first hand how their data was collected, but the quote above was from the article you posted. The local scientist casting aside the EPA's data said we should not instigate fear of the unknown with no justification. I think it's pretty known and justified.

Sorry, misunderstanding.

Well as of right now 10:10 am PST. 12/22/2013 the Fresno site is off-line or maybe it has been moved to Turlock as I don't recall seeing that site before. Bakersfield also had a station (it typically had higher readings than Fresno) but disappeared some time this fall. We had more bad air readings a few days past than in the past 12 years combined per local air board. No radiation mentioned just particulates and blaming it on perhaps the driest year in Fresno History.

Turlock CA is one of our new private radiation station that just came online. The EPA is doing it best to stop us from knowing what the true radiation levels are in Fresno Ca. The more units we get outside on air filters, the less we will need the EPA data.

The lab equipment shown on the EPA site is drool worthy though. Probably over a million dollars worth of scintillators, mass spectrometers, gas chromatographs, etc. I would so love a lab like that, but a mass spec alone that can detect all isotopes of elements we'd need to look for from tritium to Californium 251/252 (half lives of 898, 2.64 years respectively) is a little over 100 grand.

This situation has led me to do a lot of research into fission chains of elements and their isotopes, and how they were originally created and discovered. People seem to focus on the cesium, strontium, tritium, and plutonium, but we have a whole new unregulated lab in Japan creating heavy elements. Well, three of them really. Elements that may have had half lives of minutes or seconds could be in an environment where they can be stable and react with other isotopes from the environment outside the reactor. Let's look at a simple example, Californium: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Californium. Look at the section on production.

"Three californium isotopes with significant half-lives are produced, requiring a total of 15 neutron captures by uranium-238 without nuclear fission or alpha decay occurring during the process."

I'd say the U238 stands a pretty good chance of that when it's in a molten pool. Elements and their isotopes are often made by inserting a rod of material that will capture neutrons in a reactor, and one thing I haven't seen discussed is if any of the reactors in Japan were enriching anything at the time. In addition to everything in the environment getting blasted with neutrons and forming isotopes upon isotopes, what really was already there? What new elements and compounds have been or are being formed that we haven't even discovered and documented? One thing seems obvious, the folks on the Reagan got exposed to some pretty exotic stuff with half-lives of days or weeks. Personally in CA I'd love to test for every known isotope that has a half-life of a month or more. It's so frustrating to just see a simple read-out on a Geiger counter and never know exactly what is causing that reading. Did we get sprinkled with some neptunium and americum, a bit of curium, or is there a huge flood of tritium joining our water cycle? On the other hand, did some star just supernova and happened to have it's poles pointed towards earth? You'll never know. It just says 150, and that's dangerous.