Japan’s radiation pollution wider and more serious than previously estimated

the contamination in the area is so severe that authorities need to remove not only the topsoil but also road surfaces, roofs and concrete walls….

“Radiation levels drop soon after decontamination work, but whenever it rains, contaminated soil flows into the area from surrounding mountain forests and the levels climb once again,” she said.
Experts and locals said woodlands that cover 71 per cent of Fukushima prefecture have been highly contaminated.

Concern grows over wider radiation contamination, Oman Daily Observer 22 October 2011 By Takehiko Kambayashi – Scientists, environmentalists and citizens’ groups have called for Japanese authorities to evacuate more areas in the wake of March’s nuclear accident after finding wider radiation contamination than officially reported.

Researchers have found up to 6.15 million becquerels per square metre of soil in Fukushima city, 60 kilometres north-west of a nuclear power plant that has been leaking radioactive material into the environment since it was damaged in an earthquake and tsunami in the spring.
The measurement is four times higher than the levels used to declare mandatory evacuation areas around Chernobyl, Ukraine, after the 1986 nuclear accident there, the Japanese branch of the environmental organisation Friends of the Earth said.
“The government should encourage children and pregnant women to evacuate the affected areas,” Kanna Mitsuta, a Friends of the Earth researcher who participated in the survey, said on Thursday. Residents in the town’s district of Watari also found their Geiger counters going off their scales, which go up to 10 microsieverts per hour, Mitsuta said.

By comparison, only 7 kilometres from the power plant and deep within the 20 kilometre exclusion zone around the nuclear station, radiation levels were recorded at 14.24 microsieverts per hour on Wednesday. Becquerels measure the units of radiation emitted from a substance. Sieverts measure the potential impact of the radiation on an exposed organism.
The research, which examined soil samples collected on September 14 from five locations in Fukushima, was led by Tomoya Yamauchi, professor and radiation expert at Kobe University. Yamauchi has joined Friends of the Earth Japan and other civic groups in urging the evacuation of at least those most vulnerable to radiation exposure…..

Yamauchi said the contamination in the area is so severe that authorities need to remove not only the topsoil but also road surfaces, roofs and concrete walls. Mitsuta expressed concern that the official clean-up is superficial and its effects only temporary.
“Radiation levels drop soon after decontamination work, but whenever it rains, contaminated soil flows into the area from surrounding mountain forests and the levels climb once again,” she said.
Experts and locals said woodlands that cover 71 per cent of Fukushima prefecture have been highly contaminated.
Most areas of the prefecture are showing radiation levels above 5.2 millisieverts per year, one leading critic said, adding that any area in a nuclear power plant showing those levels would be declared out of bounds to anyone under 18.
But the government has deliberately raised thresholds to minimise the economic impact on the prefecture, said Hiroaki Koide, an assistant professor at Kyoto University’s Research Reactor Institute…

http://main.omanobserver.om/node/69357