Fukushima radiation evacuees fear return
Four years after the nuclear meltdown, Japan is to declare its first ‘safe’ town
NARAHA, JAPAN // More than four years since Satoru Yamauchi abandoned his noodle restaurant to escape radiation spreading from the tsunami-wrecked Fukushima nuclear plant, the Japanese government is almost ready to declare it safe to go home.
But, like many of the displaced, he is not sure if he wants to.
“I want my old life back, but I don’t think it’s possible here,” he said on a visit to the dusty soba buckwheat noodle restaurant in Nahara.
The father of four has lived in Tokyo since escaping the toxic pollution from the crippled reactors hit by the March 2011 tsunami. Meltdowns in three of the reactors 20 kilometres away blanketed vast tracts of land with isotopes of iodine and cesium – products of nuclear reactions hazardous to health if ingested, inhaled or absorbed.
Of the municipalities surrounding the nuclear plant, which were evacuated, Naraha will be the first to which people will be allowed to return.
After years of decontamination work, the government will in September lift the evacuation order and declare it a safe place to live. Other towns and villages will follow, with prime minister Shinzo Abe’s government aiming to lift many evacuation orders by March 2017.
A year after that, the monthly 100,000 yen (Dh2,950) in “psychological compensation” that plant operator Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco) must pay evacuees, will cease.
Activists say despite government assurances, many areas still show highly-elevated levels of contamination, and many are unfit for habitation.
They say that for people who abandoned their mortgaged homes, allowing Tepco to stop payments equates to coercion to return. Environmental campaign group Greenpeace has studied radiation contamination in Iitate, a forested 200-square-km district 40km north-west of the crippled plant that is also being eyed for resettlement.
The town is significant because the government did not order its evacuation until more than a month after the nuclear accident, but post-facto modelling of the radiation plume showed it was right in its path. Greenpeace’s study, published yesterday, said only a quarter of Iitate has been decontaminated – mainly roads, homes and a buffer strip of woodland. “Levels of radiation in both decontaminated and non- decontaminated areas make a return of the former inhabitants of Iitate not possible from a public health perspective,” the report said.
A resident could expect to absorb 20 times the internationally- accepted level for public exposure, Greenpeace said.
“The levels of radiation in the forests, which pre- accident were an integral part of life, are equivalent to radiation levels within the Chernobyl 30km exclusion zone”, the report said, referring to the Soviet Union plant that was the scene of one of the world’s worst nuclear accidents. “Over 118,000 people were permanently evacuated from the 30km zone around Chernobyl in April 1986, with no prospect or plans for them ever returning.”
The woodlands of Iitate are “acting as a long-lasting reservoir for radiocesium and as a large source for future recontamination in the environment beyond the forest,” it said.
That makes the very notion of “decontamination” problematic, said Jan Vande Putte, a Greenpeace campaigner.
“There is a risk that the migration of radiation will recontaminate decontaminated areas.”
In Naraha, which is south-east of the plant – effectively upwind of the disaster – government data shows contamination levels are much lower than Iitate.
According to a survey, many residents want to return. The end of the evacuation order is “based on citizens’ real voices and plans to accelerate reconstruction”, pro- resettlement mayor Yukiei Matsumoto said.
But for some of those faced with the choice of returning, concerns are still high. “There is nothing good about going back,” said Mr Yamauchi.