In 2018, the Japanese government ended housing subsidies for the tens of thousands of people who remain displaced from their homes.
The push to resettle Fukushima’s red zone began in 2011, when the allowable dose limits for radiation exposure were raised twentyfold, from one millisievert per year to twenty.
One millisievert per year remains the allowable dose for the rest of Japan. Twenty millisieverts per year was formerly the dose allowed for workers in nuclear power plants.
Spike
The difference explains why women, particularly women with young children, have resisted returning to Fukushima, regardless of the new schools – and subsidies for everything from eating out in local restaurants to gym membership.
Decontaminating Fukushima included a Pharaonic project to remove and bag all the topsoil containing cesium-137 and other radioactive elements.
One hundred thousand workers in Tyvek suits and masks swarmed over Fukushima’s towns and rice paddies, scraping up five centimeters of soil and piling it into great pyramids of black plastic garbage bags.
Radiation levels in town centers and school yards were lowered, but a short walk into neighboring patches of grass will spike the needle on a dosimeter.
Dumped
So, too, do the winter storms that wash radioactive material down from the mountains and forests that cover three-quarters of Fukushima’s nuclear exclusion zone.
Most of the soil that was scraped up and bagged has been re-deposited into a dump built on the cliff behind the destroyed reactors. This facility separates out the most radioactive elements and sequesters them in concrete bunkers.
Soil measuring less than 8,000 becquerels per kilo, which the ministry of the environment calls “happy soil,” is readied for shipment across the country, to be used in landfills and construction.
A load of happy soil, described as “revitalized and strong,” was recently dumped into the flower beds in front of the prime minister’s office in Tokyo.
Earthquakes
“This is a dangerous level of radioactivity,” says Yukio Shirahige, who worked for thirty-six years as a cleaner mopping up spills at Fukushima Daiichi. “At these levels you have to wear gloves and protective gear. If you had any cuts or open wounds, you were taken off the job.”
While happy soil can measure up to 8,000 becquerels per kilo, the dose limit for food in Japan is 100 becquerels per kilo.
Japan adopted this strategy to reduce the “heavy burden” on Fukushima and speed the area’s recovery, but Shirahige suspects another motive. “If all of Japan is contaminated, then Fukushima will appear to have recovered because it looks just like the rest of the country.”
With over a thousand earthquakes a year and an ongoing disaster at Fukushima, Japan would be wise to wise to think twice about restarting its nuclear fleet.
This Author
Thomas A Bass is a professor of English and journalism at the University at Albany. He is the author of eight books, including Return to Fukushima.
