Condensed Pressure

Ministry of Environment on Friday started carrying contaminated soil in Fukushima Prefecture to the intermediate stockyard in two towns, where residents had evacuated. After people scraped the land contaminated by radioactive materials emitted from broken First Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant, huge amount of poisonous soil has been accumulated everywhere. It was crucial to find somewhere the soil should be concentrated. However, there is no relevant reason for the soil to be dumped in two towns. The government of Japan has been incompetent in building a consensus.

The greatest problem of Japanese government is that the bureaucrats firmly believe their advantage over local governments. To promote a policy, bureaucrats in Tokyo have always been aggressive. In the case of finding a place for the intermediate stockyard, Ministry of Environment put pressure on Fukushima prefectural government.

The national government has power to control budget for reconstruction of Fukushima. The region has a great concern on health of children supposedly exposed to radiation after the accident. To keep moderate relationship with Tokyo, former Governor of Fukushima accepted an offer to build intermediate facility in Fukushima area. He stepped down soon after the decision.

Then, focus went to the towns, Okuma and Futaba, where the broken plant located. Most people evacuated from those towns had been suffered from pressure coming from neighbors, which require the towns to accept the facility. Leaders of the town could not stand bad reputation on their people living in other cities and towns. The decision was aimed to protect them.

Now, pressure is on the landowners of the area for the facility. There are twenty-three hundred landowners on the land with four thousand acres. Injustice of Ministry of Environment is that they started sending contaminated soil without obtaining consent from anyone of the landowners except one. They secured small area for testing, which had a capacity to lay down 0.1% of all contaminated soil in Fukushima area.

The landowners are facing ugly scenario that their land property will be surrounded by great plastic bags containing poisonous soil. Even though the government promised that final processing facility would be build outside of Fukushima, it has shown no effort to implement it so far. People in Fukushima doubt that the government is gong to make the intermediate facility the final one. The strangest thing is that there is too few arguments to ask responsibility of TEPCO.