Big Buy of Real Estate

It is an unprecedented real estate project by the national government of Japan. Ministers of Environment and Reconstruction offered the Governor of Fukushima buying huge land around broken First Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant to preserve land for “temporary” facilities to storage radioactively contaminated debris. The residents who sell the land will not be able to return home for decades at least. Two years and eight months after the accident happened, the national government at last embarked on controlling the area forever as in Chernobyl.

The land necessary for the facility project is as big as 4,700 acres. The government wants to buy it with $10 billions from landlords in the towns of Futaba, Okuma and Naraha, where no residents had return back to the houses. The facility will be able to contain 12,300 cubic feet of contaminated debris, including soils scraped from towns, grasses and leaves collected from the forests or cloths with which they wiped their houses and buildings.

With no place to stock the debris, decontamination has been making slow progress. Building stock facilities has been the most necessary measure to guarantee the people in Fukushima stable life without fear of radioactive effect. Most people expect apparent improvement in the decontamination effort after the facilities are built.

Because the land will be used mainly for the facilities, residents around need to get other places to live. Most people have been living outside of the towns in temporary houses or already decided not to get back home. It becomes more difficult to maintain local community in the way they had before the accident. It is even possible that those three towns will disappear from the map of Japan.

It even is unclear whether the facilities are really “temporary.” They are recognized as stockyards until radioactive debris will be sent to other places for final solution. But there is no viable plan for it so far. The government promised that it would make a law for determining building final facilities outside of Fukushima prefecture. Since it is a story for decades later, the implementation is quite not guaranteed.

The government of Japan has been telling that all refugees would be returning home some day. The policy of buying lands is a big change, forcing the residents to abandon their homes. True meaning of this policy change is that an unpredictable nuclear disaster can create sterile soil forever. Promoting resumptions of halted nuclear power plants fundamentally contradicts with the solid fact of danger of nuclear reactors.