Fukushima and the Internet of Things: What the Internet of Things can do in ten years

Exactly ten years ago today, the tsunami killed more than 20,000 people and displaced hundreds of thousands of families, some of whom had been displaced for many years. It also caused meltdowns at three Level 7 reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Residents within a 20-kilometer radius of the nuclear power plant were quickly evacuated. The whole world was watching, waiting and worried whether another Chernobyl disaster would occur.

　Safecast has been cooperating with the world for ten years

But unlike the Chernobyl accident, its impact has been felt for many years. Unknown to the global scientific community, news of the disaster spread quickly. Once informed, a coalition of citizen scientists responded to the crisis and the challenges it presented via emails, chat discussion threads, and video calls.

Even setting aside the political realities of the Cold War, the infrastructure for the democratization of global communications did not exist when the Chernobyl disaster occurred in 1986. Likewise, if the Fukushima accident had happened ten years ago, the community response would have been much slower. Global broadband was just starting to ramp up in 2001, and there wouldn't be video collaboration tools to speak of until 2003.

But the Fukushima incident occurred on March 11, 2011. In the ten years from 2001 to 2011, mankind established a global communication infrastructure supported by broadband and cloud, making it possible to spread news in real time and collaborate remotely. In just ten years, we have developed the ability to understand and respond to crises in a timely manner. We put ourselves out there on the Internet, and it was the existence of this infrastructure that allowed the original Safecast team to form: first to connect, check in, and help, and then to solve a new set of problems that just emerged from the disaster.

　Internet of Things and Global Insights for a Decade

In the early days of the Fukushima accident, local residents and the global scientific community faced greater challenges. The big problem is access to information. The government and local utility companies had some knowledge of the situation on the ground, but did not share it. The rest of the world can only guess at the extent of the damage or the safety of the surrounding area.

TenFor years we have connected ourselves via the internet, but the world and environment around us remains a mystery. Safecast is here to change the world, first by deploying Geiger counters and radiation detection equipment, then expanding to air quality monitoring. Over the past decade, Safecast has deployed 5,000 radiation and air quality monitoring devices in 102 countries, collecting more than 66,000 measurements every day.

5,000 locations around the world have a better understanding of air quality than they did 10 years ago. In 5,000 locations, citizens can know if the air outside is safe and access data about their environment through video calls as friends.

Over the same decade, the cost of sensors, silicon, PCBs and radios continued to fall. As IoT hype gives way to reality, the continued growth of manufacturer- and developer-friendly tools has led to a Cambrian explosion of connected devices.

After 10 years, 5,000 devices and millions of data points collected, organizations like Safecast don’t think their work is done. If anything, just as the democratization of broadband and the cloud laid the foundation for the Internet of Things, the past decade has been a test of the value humans can extract by adding devices to our environment. As environmental data from open datasets, a successful test is used to inform scientific research, shape policy and help ordinary citizens understand their world.

Just imagine what we can do by 2031.

　(Original title: Fukushima and the Internet of Things: What can the Internet of Things do in ten years)