nuclear-news

Gloom of Fukushima’s ghost areas

Fukushima ghost towns struggle to recover amid high radiation levels Post-tsunami reconstruction and radiation cleanup could take 10 years, but officials say something has been permanently lost Simon Tisdall in Namie The Guardian, Thursday 2 January 2014 Nearly three years after a major earthquake, tsunami and nuclear radiation leak devastated coastal and inland areas of Japan’sFukushima prefecture, 175 miles north-east of Tokyo, Namie has become a silent town of ghosts and absent lives.

Namie’s 21,000 residents remain evacuated because of continuing high radiation levels, the product of the March 2011 disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station, six miles to the south. Homes, shops and streets are deserted except for the occasional police patrol or checkpoint…..

Namie is nobody’s town now. Nobody lives here, and nobody visits for long. Even the looters have stopped bothering, and no one knows exactly when the inhabitants may be allowed to return permanently – or whether they will want to.

The 2011 catastrophe faded from world headlines long ago, but in Namie, Tomioka, Okuma, Futaba and other blighted towns in the 20-mile evacuation zone around the Fukushima plant, it is a disaster that never ends……..

For Fukushima’s displaced population, the effects of the disaster continue to be deeply felt. The evacuation area was subdivided earlier this year into three zones of higher or lower radiation risk. In the worst affected zone, return will not be allowed before 2017 at the earliest.

In other areas, families and businesses face difficult decisions about whether or not to go back. At present, no one is even allowed to stay overnight. Locals say that whatever happens, many younger people will not return.

There is little or no trust in official pronouncements, given the failure of the Fukushima Daiichi operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco), to take adequate measures to protect the plant against the tsunami and the company’s unimpressive post-disaster record.

There are suspicions that the government knows some towns may never be safe to live in again, but refuses to admit it in order to protect Japan’s unpopular nuclear power industry. There is also a sense that Fukushima’s victims have been forgotten……Nobody has died directly as a result of the nuclear disaster, but a close eye is being kept on the incidence of thyroid cancer in children, following the experience of Chernobyl…….

Tetsurou Eguchi, the deputy mayor of Minamisoma City, said the radiation-related cleanup was likely to take another five to six years and could cost as much as ¥350bn (£2bn), much of which would come from the national government. Post-tsunami reconstruction would take up to 10 years. But something intangible had been permanently lost, he said. “When it comes to the economy, and individual and social life, it is very difficult to recover this, compared with how it used to be.”

The most challenging problem, he said, was decontamination. “Basically [the radioactive fallout] is not in the air any more. It’s in the soil.” The area was dependent economically on small businesses, agriculture, fishing and tourism, including the famous annual Soma Nomaoi samurai festival, he said. All had been seriously affected…….

“I don’t think Fukushima is fully supported by the whole country. And that’s what the citizens here think.” http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jan/01/fukushima-ghost-towns-high-radiation-levels-tsunami

January 2, 2014 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Fukushima 2014, social effects