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Playing Pass the Parcel With Fukushima
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/08/opinion/playing-pass-the-parcel-with-fukushima.html?_r=0
Playing Pass the Parcel With Fukushima
PETER WYNN KIRBYMARCH 7, 2016
OXFORD, England — In the five years since the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdowns that devastated Fukushima Prefecture, the Japanese government has undertaken mammoth efforts to decontaminate irradiated communities.
Thousands of workers have removed millions of tons of radioactive debris from backyards and fields, roadsides and school grounds. They have scraped away acres and acres of tainted soil, collected surface vegetal matter, wiped down entire buildings and hosed and scrubbed streets and sidewalks.
<snip>
The Japanese authorities call these efforts josen (decontamination), but the word is misleading and the activity largely a fallacy. What’s happening is more like transcontamination: Once the radioactive debris is collected and bagged, it is transferred from one part of Fukushima to another, and then another.
The waste is placed in bags, which are periodically collected and brought to provisional storage areas (kari-kari-okiba), before being moved to more secure, though still temporary, storage depots (kari-okiba). Officials at the Ministry of the Environment have said up to 30 million tons of radioactive waste will eventually be moved to yet another, third-level interim storage facility near the crippled Fukushima Daiichi plant. But no significant construction has begun. In fact, the authorities haven’t even managed to convince all the relevant absentee landowners in the area to sell the necessary plots.
So for now the radioactive waste is either lying around or being moved around. Throughout Fukushima, there are large cylindrical plastic sacks — each roughly the size of a hot tub and weighing about a ton when full — stacked in desultory heaps by the side of roads, near driveways or in abandoned lots. In the town of Tomioka in mid-October, I saw three dozen bags piled along the edges of a small cemetery, overtaken by weeds.
The bags deteriorate after three years, meaning that the waste has to be repackaged regularly. Sacks are sometimes moved from one facility to another, based on their levels of radioactivity, which vary and can shift over time. By last fall, there were more than 9 million one-ton bags of radioactive waste. Standard trucks carry fewer than 10 bags at a time — meaning that radioactive material is regularly rotating around Fukushima in a slow-motion version of pass the nuclear parcel.
<snip>
Playing Pass the Parcel With Fukushima
PETER WYNN KIRBYMARCH 7, 2016
OXFORD, England — In the five years since the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdowns that devastated Fukushima Prefecture, the Japanese government has undertaken mammoth efforts to decontaminate irradiated communities.
Thousands of workers have removed millions of tons of radioactive debris from backyards and fields, roadsides and school grounds. They have scraped away acres and acres of tainted soil, collected surface vegetal matter, wiped down entire buildings and hosed and scrubbed streets and sidewalks.
<snip>
The Japanese authorities call these efforts josen (decontamination), but the word is misleading and the activity largely a fallacy. What’s happening is more like transcontamination: Once the radioactive debris is collected and bagged, it is transferred from one part of Fukushima to another, and then another.
The waste is placed in bags, which are periodically collected and brought to provisional storage areas (kari-kari-okiba), before being moved to more secure, though still temporary, storage depots (kari-okiba). Officials at the Ministry of the Environment have said up to 30 million tons of radioactive waste will eventually be moved to yet another, third-level interim storage facility near the crippled Fukushima Daiichi plant. But no significant construction has begun. In fact, the authorities haven’t even managed to convince all the relevant absentee landowners in the area to sell the necessary plots.
So for now the radioactive waste is either lying around or being moved around. Throughout Fukushima, there are large cylindrical plastic sacks — each roughly the size of a hot tub and weighing about a ton when full — stacked in desultory heaps by the side of roads, near driveways or in abandoned lots. In the town of Tomioka in mid-October, I saw three dozen bags piled along the edges of a small cemetery, overtaken by weeds.
The bags deteriorate after three years, meaning that the waste has to be repackaged regularly. Sacks are sometimes moved from one facility to another, based on their levels of radioactivity, which vary and can shift over time. By last fall, there were more than 9 million one-ton bags of radioactive waste. Standard trucks carry fewer than 10 bags at a time — meaning that radioactive material is regularly rotating around Fukushima in a slow-motion version of pass the nuclear parcel.
<snip>
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