The View From Japan's Nuclear 'Hot Zone'

    Modern Geiger counters don't click. As is the case with so many other devices, they have gone digital.  At least that is true for the high-tech 1 Japanese Geiger counters here. But they still measure radiation（放射） exposure in the quaint-sounding "clicks per minute."After spending nearly all of the past six days in the "hot zone" of Fukushima Prefecture, it seemed prudent 2, while reporting from a radiation screening checkpoint, to see how much clicking my own body would register.

    Arriving at the Koriyama Municipal Gymnasium was akin 3 to walking on to the set of a science-fiction movie. Men clad head to toe in white anti-contamination suits calmly guided visitors through the gauntlet. Other "space men" unloaded boxes full of white masks.

    Japanese, young and old, expressed no emotion as a mysterious device rendered their radioactive fate.

    When my turn came the needle began to jump as the man in the space suit scanned my torso. I knew not to become immediately alarmed. After all, with the jump in background radiation levels in the past few days in the prefecture, it was not surprising that I had absorbed some extra radiation.

    I had done an online cram 4 course in radiation to conclude that even if I had been quite close to the crippled nuclear facility (and I was at least 30 kilometers away at all times), I was unlikely to have picked up more radiation than I would absorb on a trans-Pacific flight - or, at the very worst, a chest X-ray.

    When the Geiger counter descended 5 to my feet I looked at the meter and my heart jumped. The reading had pinned the needle.

    I noticed a subtle look of surprise in the technician's（技师技术员） eyes - perhaps he was thinking, "I've got a live one!" ( this one is worth special attention ) He switched the meter to a higher scale and intoned that perhaps I should wash my footwear.

    "What is the reading?" I asked in Japanese, with the same nervous voice one might use seeking the results of a biopsy.  He replied, "3,000 cpm [clicks per minute]."CPM is a comparatively crude measurement to determine radiation exposure, calculating the number of atoms in a certain quantity of radioactive material that are detected to have decayed in one minute.

    It was important to put things in journalistic perspective. So I asked, what was the typical reading in Koriyama for a test subject prior to the radiation leakage 6 from any of the six troubled reactors 7 at the Fukushima-1 plant?

    The technician replied that it would have been 300 to 600 cpm. He also said it was likely that my boots had picked up the radiation from material falling from the sky in the rain and snow during the past couple of days. By comparison, the reading on my torso peaked around 1,500 cpm.

    I was assured that the current readings, even on my 20-year-old boots, were nothing alarming.（本文由在线英语听力室整理编辑）