School students get to grips with emergency equipment during a trip at Huashi Fire Bureau in Dongcheng district on Sunday. [Photo/China Daily]

Environmental experts release data collected from monitoring stations; forecasts predict no danger

Radiation levels in the capital saw no change in the 10 days following the leak at a Japanese nuclear power plant, according to an official report released online.

Readings published by the municipal environmental protection bureau shows levels ranged from 77.0 to 81.4 nano-Gray per hour (nGy/h) between March 12 and 22. The accepted range is 60.2 and 119.9 nGy/h.

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Beijing became the first Chinese city to install automatic radiation monitoring in 2007. Eight stations are spread across Chaoyang, Haidian, Daxing, Shunyi, Fangshan, Changping and Shijingshan districts and are programmed to raise the alarm if radiation levels exceed the safety limit. This is the first time data collected by the stations has been released to the public.

Although the international units for measuring radiation are usually micro-Sievert per hour (Sv/h) or milli-Sievert per hour (mSv/h), experts in the capital use nGy/h, with 1 nGy/h equal to 0.001Sv/h.

According to forecasts on Monday by the Beijing-based Regional Specialized Meteorological Center, which is under the World Meteorological Organization, any radioactive discharge from Japan in the next three days will be heading away from China.

From Monday to Wednesday, experts predict the lower layer of the radioactive material will head southeast from Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, with the medial layer heading northeast.