Some Fukushima residents 'may never return home'

15 November 2013



Japanese officials have, for the first time, conceded that thousands of residents evacuated from areas near the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant may never be able to return home. There is now considerable uncertainty over whether residual radiation can be brought down to safe levels, and a suggestion that some areas closest to the wreckage of the facility will remain too contaminated for people to make a permanent return.
Soon after the March 2011 disaster the Japanese government promised the 160 000 refugees that their homes would in due course be fit to live in again. But a report published by members of the governing Liberal Democratic party has urged the government to abandon its promise, calling for a new plan in two parts - to provide financial support for displaced residents to move to new homes elsewhere, and for more state funding for the storage of the huge quantities of radioactive waste being removed from the 12-mile evacuation zone around the former plant.
New evidence suggest that attempts to reduce near-site radiation to the target of 1 millisievert a year are failing, and that the decontamination process is well behind schedule, forcing authorities to concede recently that they will not finish the work by the March 2014 deadline originally set.
The cost of the cleanup is also causing problems for Tepco, the plant's operator, which has been given a huge government loan to fund the cleanup, but has balked at paying it back while it focuses on the costly decommissioning operation at Fukushima Daiichi that is expected to last at least 30 years.
The report says that government is prepared to borrow another 3 trillion yen to compensate evacuees and speed up decontamination of homes, schools and other public buildings in areas where reducing radiation levels is more realistic. New funding on that scale will bring Japan's expenditure on the nuclear crisis so far to $80bn, a figure that does not cover the cost of decommissioning the damaged reactors.
"At some point in time, someone will have to say that this region is uninhabitable, but we will make up for it," the LDP's secretary general, Shigeru Ishiba, said recently. It now seems likely that the government will abandon efforts to clean up the highly irradiated areas closest to the plant and focus on areas where there is a more realistic chance of success.



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