ActSmall · Ground

About ActSmall · Ground

A small, slowly-growing portal for what comes up out of the ground where you live: indoor radon, well-water contaminants, and the small concrete things to do about them. The shared policies (privacy, license, terms, contribute) live on actsmall.org — this page covers only what is specific to ground.

What this topic is

Public confusion about ionising radiation is heavily lopsided. The cinematic sources - reactors, weapons-test fallout, X-ray machines - dominate the conversation. The actually-dominant source for most people - indoor radon, a colourless soil gas that the World Health Organization calls the second leading cause of lung cancer after smoking - is barely mentioned. The actually-actionable thing - a $20 home test kit - is rarely the action people are pointed at when they read about radiation.

This site exists to flip that ratio. It is a small, durable, signup-free middle layer: a country map driven by named public-agency data, a short library of source-cited primers, and a recommender that suggests one concrete next step per place. The unit of value is the kit - a $20 short-term radon test, or a $30 private-well water test - because for most readers in temperate countries with surveyed geology, that is the highest-leverage single action available.

Editorial care specific to ground

  • Radon is not nuclear politics. Indoor radon comes from the natural radioactive decay of uranium in soil and rock. It has nothing to do with nuclear power, weapons testing, or any human policy decision. We keep the radon story strictly separate from any reactor or weapons discussion so neither side can pull it into their argument.
  • We do not prescribe. We do not tell you whether a given Bq/m3 reading is “safe” or what you should do clinically. We display what the WHO, the IARC, and named national radiation protection agencies have published in their own words, with their citations visible, and let you decide.
  • No dose-response claims. We do not invent numbers. Every quantitative claim is sourced to a named public-health body or peer-reviewed paper. Where the underlying evidence has confidence intervals, we say so.
  • No 5G or EMF map layer. The WHO and the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection (ICNIRP) have repeatedly found no established public-health hazard at consumer exposures to radiofrequency electromagnetic fields. We display what those bodies say on the “what this site does not cover” primer; we do not add a map layer that would imply otherwise.
  • No partisan tilt on nuclear policy. Whether to expand or shrink civilian nuclear power is a real, contested policy question. It is not a public-health question with a single right answer in any national context. We do not take a position; the topic stays focused on household-radiation actions that work the same regardless of energy policy.

The shared editorial posture - source-cited, plain English, no engagement loops, no donations - lives at actsmall.org/about/.

Data sources for ground

The country map joins three categories of input, refreshed once a day at ~08:13 UTC (with up to a 60-minute jitter window) by a small AWS Lambda. The Lambda only consumes documented public APIs at their published cadence; it never scrapes, never crawls, and never bypasses a rate limit.

  • Indoor radon baselines (static, deploy-time). Country-level arithmetic-mean indoor radon concentrations and classification, hand-authored from the WHO Handbook on Indoor Radon and named national radiation protection agencies: the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), the German Federal Office for Radiation Protection (BfS), the Czech State Office for Radiation Protection (SURO), the Swedish Radiation Safety Authority (SSM), the Finnish Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority (STUK), the Norwegian Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority (DSA), the French Institute for Radiological Protection and Nuclear Safety (IRSN), Health Canada, the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency (ARPANSA), and equivalent bodies in other countries. Each entry cites its source and year on the country card. The seed file lives at data/radon-baseline.json in this repository; updates on deploy, not on the daily Lambda schedule. Where a country has no comprehensive national survey we omit it entirely and the front-end renders no current reading.
  • Adult smoking prevalence (live, daily). Adult tobacco use prevalence as a share of the population (World Bank SH.PRV.SMOK; CC BY 4.0), sourced from the WHO Global Health Observatory. The same indicator is used to compute the joint radon-and-smoking signal that drives the default map view.
  • Drinking-water access gap (live, daily). Population without safely-managed drinking water (computed from World Bank SH.H2O.SMDW.ZS; CC BY 4.0), sourced from the WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme. Used as a leading indicator for the rural-and-private-well population most exposed to naturally-occurring groundwater contaminants.
  • Arsenic-affected aquifers (static, deploy-time). Country-level flags for the WHO-documented arsenic-affected aquifers - the Bengal basin, the Mekong delta, the Chaco-Pampean plain, the Hetao basin, the recognised US, Mexican, and Chilean aquifers. The seed file lives at data/arsenic-affected.json in this repository, sourced from the WHO Arsenic fact sheet and named regional surveys.

How the daily refresh and link curator work in general: actsmall.org/methodology/.

If something is wrong

If you find an error, an out-of-date source, a broken link, a country-level claim that does not match the cited source, or a claim that overstates the underlying evidence: please email submissions@actsmall.org with the page URL and what looks wrong. The maintainers will review. We take corrections seriously - the topic depends on visitors trusting that named-source citations actually back up what we say.

Where to read more