Polluted Soil in the Yard

Decontamination of the soil in Fukushima, polluted with radioactive material emitted from First Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant after severe accident in March 2011, will mostly be finished by the end of this month. The soil scraped from the surface has been accumulated in temporary processing yards located rural area in Fukushima Prefecture. The people in Fukushima will have to be careful on radiation effused from the open yards for many years, due to the delay of constructing permanent processing facilities.

It was five months later from the accident when then Prime Minister Naoto Kan made a request of building a mid-term processing facility in Fukushima Prefecture to then Fukushima Governor Yuhei Sato. Original plan made by Ministry of Environment in October 2011 assumed that the contaminated soil would be contained in the mid-term processing facility for thirty years after placing in temporary stockyard for three years. After a series of sharp arguments between national government and Fukushima, Shinzo Abe administration decided to build the mid-term facility in Towns of Futaba and Okuma, where the broken nuclear power plant was located.

Basic condition for Fukushima government is to move all the amount of contaminated soil to other place thirty years later. As related law for treatment of contaminated soil, the national government has to remove the soil by March 2045. However, thirty years for stoking the soil is scientifically baseless. Although the officers of Ministry of Environment expected technological improvement for reducing the amount of contaminated soil in thirty years, there is no guarantee of determining somewhere that soil will be going to. The place for final processing facility has not found yet.

The national government has obtained only 20% of whole 1,600 ha of the land so far. After carrying of the soil started in March 2015, only 200 thousand cubic meters of soil has been stocked in the mid-term processing facility. 22 million cubic meters of contaminated soil is still waiting for moving in. In a simple calculation, it takes over one hundred years to finish the transfer of soil.

Delay of disposal of the polluted soil means delay of reconstruction. The evacuees cannot return home, where radioactive soil is accumulated around. Politics is too incompetent to determine final destination of radioactive soil, spending time for finding a better way to ease, or deceive, public concern. One can imagine that the national government begins to persuade the people in Fukushima to accept that huge amount of contaminated soil permanently.