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Amid a push to bring life back to towns near the ruined nuclear plant, Insight finds out why some evacuees and experts don’t think it’s safe at all.
FUKUSHIMA: In the heart of Fukushima’s disaster zone, robots sent into the Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant have been dying.
Despite being designed to get data from its damaged reactors, the robots were, with few exceptions, wrecked within hours. The radioactivity inside has been too high for their electronics – a hurdle that must be overcome if all the melted uranium fuel rods in the reactor buildings are to be found and ways to remove them are to be developed.
This is one of the areas where the work to stabilise the nuclear site “isn’t going so well”, Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) chief decommissioning officer Naohiro Masuda told the programme Insight in a rare interview. (Watch the episode here.)
Against this backdrop, the Japanese authorities are going full steam ahead with their campaign to bring people back to the prefecture, which was evacuated after the March 2011 nuclear accident.
Eviction orders for most towns in the area have been lifted, with the government saying it is safe to go back.
But just as there are those who are heading back and those who distrust the authorities, experts are also divided over how serious the radiation problem is in the area.
One thing is clear: The crisis that the rest of the world thought was over, nearly seven years after a 9.0 undersea earthquake unleashed a tsunami that tore through Japan’s northeastern coast – including the Daiichi nuclear plant – is really not.
Fukushima’s struggle to return to normalcy can be seen most visibly in its evicted towns, where abandoned and damaged houses along empty roads sit on the scarred landscape.
At Kawamata Elementary School, six pupils in the first and third grades were rehearsing for their annual performance when Insight visited. They were the only pupils in their respective classes.
“The lower the grade, the fewer children in a class,” said principal Yoshikawa Takehiko, who has about 20 children in the sixth grade and 15 children in the fifth grade.
The school is already a merger of three schools from Iitate village, which is 35km from the nuclear plant and was contaminated by radioactive substances such as Caesium-137 after the meltdown.
The government has scraped off topsoil in areas around homes and schools in Fukushima as part of its decontamination efforts.
But the tens of thousands of large trash bags of soil and other material are still being stored all across the prefecture – even next to playgrounds – waiting to be transported to a safer place.
The government maintains that much of the soil could perhaps be recycled eventually. But the concern over radiation levels in the environment remains because 70 per cent of the affected land is forested and mountainous, which cannot be decontaminated.
“That’s where most of the radioactivity is,” said Greenpeace senior nuclear specialist Shaun Burnie.
“The decontamination is centred immediately around people’s houses … in their gardens, in school playgrounds, in rice fields and in small 10-15m strips along the roads. That’s not effective decontamination of an area.”
All around, radiation monitors have been put up, like sentinels acting as a reminder of the danger lurking. So far, the readings are within the limit the government and Tepco say is safe.
This has been the very focus, however, of the debate about whether people should return to their homes or not.
Radiation doses are measured in sieverts, and Fukushima’s evacuees are being asked to return to those areas where the level is not more than 20 millisieverts per year (mSv/year).
This is within the guideline set by the International Commission on Radiological Protection and the International Atomic Energy Agency, noted Assistant Professor Tetsuo Sawada from the Tokyo Institute of Technology’s Laboratory of Advanced Nuclear Energy.
The upper limit of the stated safe range in an emergency is 100 mSv/year, but some experts contend that exposure to even 20 mSv/year is too high.
Former World Health Organisation regional adviser (Radiation and Public Health) Keith Baverstock said: “It could be, living in your house, the dose rate is 20 mSv/year. The dose rate outside that area that has been cleaned up can be a lot higher. So no, it isn’t safe.”
Cancer specialist Misao Fujita, 55, contrasted the situation in Fukushima with medical X-ray rooms, where the typical maximum amount of radiation allowed is five mSv/year – a level that hospital staff “rarely” get exposed to, he said.
