Radiation cleanup work begins in Fukushima nuclear plant town

You need a location to hold all the radioactive material. It's called the town. 96% of the land is difficult? Then that's the storage site. Half life of 30 years or so. Wall it off for 90-120 years? It's not like you can move the radioactive materials somewhere

Parade the nuclear nutters through the town. Face the reality of consequences of bad decisions and stop using it

Lol clean up? With a dust brush and a mop? It's totally ok to spend billions of tax payers quid on weapons just to coddle trump.

Priceless photo, one guy working 100 watching, dragged and dropped to desk top.

one guy working 100 watching

Do you see the camera's? Anyway, it just shows how much the government cares. If there were no Olympic games, they would've never cleaned this up.

I still remember a poor pleb drinking a glass of puddle water to prove its safe, bet he regrets that. Cleaning up is not really a doable task. After this amount of time passed the refugees have rebooted their lives and probably don't need to return to a delapedated town. They should be as promised receive compensation lashings of it. Not their fault their homes became toxic. The real disaster is the governments actions. Clean that up.

I wonder how many more millions of cubic tons of radioactive waste will come from this town and where they intend to store it? Tell me again how nuclear power is cheap and safe.

so much negativity from everyone

I would be curious what the surveys of former residents say about their willingness to move back. I can't imagine there are going to be enough to make this a viable town again.

@papigiulio

yes i saw the cameras but was just having a bit of fun with it, why so serious son.

@Shane Sommerville - so much negativity from everyone

Ok, so what are the positives?

The best way to deal with these areas is to create a huge natural reserve and let the place rewild itself. It would create much more of a useful resource for the country than trying to force residents back to the little towns and villages there.

As usual short term thinking of the government - desperately trying to maintain the status quo.

Disillusioned

@Shane Sommerville - so much negativity from everyone

"Ok, so what are the positives?"

They're decontaminating the town.

Joeintokyo

So radiation cleanup going into 2018 involves a a cheap cloth mask and a helmet? Makes my thyroid hurt just looking at that photo.

Radioactive Iodine causes the thryroid problems. None of that left around.

Cut grass along the streets

Just exactly how does that "decontaminate" the area?

This sums it all up for me -

".....A 69-year-old woman who lives in a temporary shelter in Fukushima's Iwaki city said her house is located within the special reconstruction zone in Futaba but she has given up hope of returning there as she was evacuated over six years and nine months ago.

"If this was two or three years after the disaster, I might have a choice to return. But my house (in Futaba) became run-down and I got old. Realistically speaking, I don't think I can live there now," she said...."

A couple of years of seen-to-be-doing-something, a prettying up if you like, before the olympics.

And an amazing coincidence that the train line and station will open in March 2020 a few of months before the olympics.

Now that will be a foto-op for Abe Inc. Maybe even tears will be shed.

As the 69yr old woman indicated, if all this started years ago, it would have been much better for those who really count - the people. But I guess those valuable construction resources - money, equipment & labor - were needed in the capital to prepare for the 2020 circus coming to town.

Eventually, people will return to the area. But they won't be the ones who fled.

I’m not a scientist and only have a geigercounter, but I think plutonium has a half life of

The longest-lived are plutonium-244, with a half-life of 80.8 million years, plutonium-242, with a half-life of 373,300 years, and plutonium-239, with a half-life of 24,110 years. All of the remaining radioactive isotopes have half-lives that are less than 7,000 years

Designer

Cut grass along the streets

"Just exactly how does that "decontaminate" the area?"

The grass takes up radiocaesium from the soil, so if you cut it and remove it, it removes some contamination from the area.

@star. Then it rains, snows and typhoons. Have you herd of strontium BTW?

Quote: "Eventually, people will return to the area. But they won't be the ones who fled."

Yes, thousands of years from now.

Goodlucktoyou,

It might be instructive to add my post to your reply:

"The grass takes up radiocaesium from the soil, so if you cut it and remove it, it removes some contamination from the area.  Then it rains, snows and typhoons."

I bolded the part of my post you seem to have overlooked.

Have you herd of strontium BTW?

You mean the aromic element with atomic number 38? Gosh, no.

If one walks from home to the station and back again and lives in a hermetically sealed bubble, then it might be safe.

But living in an area where radioactive substances swirl around at the touch of wind and rain and every time a farmer starts burning cut grass etc (often, they do) and in that smoke will be radioactive elements waiting and ready to be inhaled.

Best to stay clear no?

@kwbo

Not just one guy.

thats a guy with a strimmer! Banzai!!!

any decon there is just window dressing.

Nobody in their right mind would want to go live there anymore.

Or is this to show everyone that the kizuna project is still alive and kicking?

BEfore wasting one yen first conduct a survey as to how many will or want to return

why my tax money is spent on something that is simply s waste

i have no sympathy for those that voted for the plant , received subsidies and now expect aid draw from my city tax which should be used for my city’s needs

lack of datcare

lack of rbirsing homes

they should have know the risk as Japan is well earthquake central

Hasn't the government already stopped paying these people to live in shelters after using them to get the Olympics and then giving the ear-marked funds to other parts of the country?

And there are still thousands of tons of melted atomic fuel in the ground, somewhere....

kurisupisu,

And there are still thousands of tons of melted atomic fuel in the ground, somewhere....

The term you're looking for is "resolidified atomic fuel", and the 'somewhere' is in the containment vessels.

If one walks from home to the station and back again and lives in a hermetically sealed bubble, then it might be safe.

I think it's fairly safe to assume they'll be clearing more than the routes to the station

But living in an area where radioactive substances swirl around at the touch of wind and rain and every time a farmer starts burning cut grass etc (often, they do) and in that smoke will be radioactive elements waiting and ready to be inhaled.

Do they 'swirl around' at the touch of wind and rain? I was under the impression that they percolated into the soil and then were taken up by local plants, hence the grass-cutting in the article.

As for farmers - well, there's another bonus: those lung-ailment causing fires will have to be stopped.

Best to stay clear no?

No.

wipeoutDec. 26  07:16 pm JST

They're decontaminating the town.

"Partially decontaminating part of the town."

Fair enough. How's about "decontaminating the town enough to lower exposure so that residents can permanently return.

Whether it's really worth considerable expense and effort for an evacuated town with a former population of just 6500 people is another matter. As you're very pronuclear, I expect you'd argue that it is.

Nope, that's a good point. Plenty of towns and villages across Tohoku are in terminal decline. Apparently Akita-ken will drop below half a million inhabitants by 2040. I once lived in a town that had "no habitation zones". Noting to do with contamination, it was just the expense of keeping access to these areas open in winter was becoming prohibitive.

A serious nuclear accident has destroyed this town and the lives (as they were) of its former inhabitants, and the chances of it recovering are not high.

The town has not been 'destroyed'.

Much of the population will not return, the land is poisoned, the fields are untended, and the properties have been largely abandoned for many years and will have considerably deteriorated. At the best of times, small communities like this in Japan have an ageing problem; this will be exacerbated by the fact that it is not going to attract young people back, and a major source of employment in the area, the power plant, is defunct. The place has few prospects.

It's a funny thing, but if the nuclear plant was not there, the town would likely be dying anyway. Perhaps it should be used as a site for low-level waste storage?

In that respect, it actually is hard to see the positive side of this. Frankly it looks cosmetic, and expensively so.

Well, the problem is (and this is the same across Japan) that most inhabitants want to recreate a Showa-Era Furusato that never existed. They want NHK morning drama-esque surroundings, and everything right with the world. The best thing to do with the town is to have a good deep knowlegable discussion about future possibilities.

If the town is such a basket case then why just not leave the whole area and let it go back to nature?

I'm not sure it's really a basket case, but it certainly would be one option.