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The mayor of a town in Fukushima Prefecture, which had been designated by the government as one site for an interim nuclear waste storage facility, on Monday rejected the proposal and asked the government to come up with another alternative.
Naraha Mayor Yukiei Matsumoto said local residents had rejected the plan, TBS reported.
In December, Environment Minister Nobuteru Ishiara and Reconstruction Minister Takumi Nemoto met with the mayors of Naraha, Futaba and Okuma, as well as Fukushima Gov Yueki Sato, to seek their support for the government's plan to build storage facilities for thousands of tons of soil contaminated with radiation and other nuclear waste from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant disaster.
Reconstruction work in Fukushima has progressed much slower than in Iwate and Miyagi prefectures because the government has been unable to find a site to store all the contaminated waste.called on Monday for a review of the central government's plan to build an interim storage facility for radioactive waste in his town in Fukushima Prefecture.
The plan calls for the government to spend 100 billion yen on the project, which involves buying about 16 square kilometers of land in Futaba and Okuma towns, which lie in the no-go zone around the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, and about three square kilometers of land near the idle Fukushima Daini plant in Naraha. Decontamination work is expected to be completed at that site by 2015, which is when the government wants all three storage facilities ready for operation.
The facilities themselves, which will be able to store 28 million cubic meters of waste, are expected to cost 1 trillion yen to build, the environment ministry says.
The three mayors have expressed reservations about the plan and asked if the government can assure the safety of the storage facilities.
Some residents are opposed to the plan because the land is ancestral and they fear they will never be able to return to their land if the storage facilities are permanent.
The government plans to enact a law stating that the waste must be moved out of the prefecture with 30 years.
© Japan Today
11 Comments
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MapleG
What mayor in his right mind would want a nuclear waste facility in his own town?
Damien15
Okinawa already have enough burden, move it to remote parts of coldest areas where there are not many people.
nath
Matsumoto is speaking up for his people. Good man.
pointofview
Since Japan isn`t a democratic country all final decisions will come down to the oppressive national govt. Just look at the secrecy law 84% opposed it but still pushed through. Time to get a little louder Japan.
IparryU
@zichi, eaxactly. but i would say more than 20 km would be a safer approach, say like 50 km. why risk peoples'? a much better approach would be to get everyone to an undeveloped area, teach them some trade like construction, plumbing, electric work, and then they can create a brand new area to thrive in that gives them something to hope for in life. keeping them in limbo like they are now in shelters is just going to make things worse down the road. especially when it gets closer to the Olympics
People should not even be there in the first place... Yes it is ancestral and all, but it is also contaminated and despite what they had there, they need to pack up and go. the govt should have made this mandatory years ago, but they decided to let people stay there. Quite possibly cause they want to downplay this whole incident as much as possible.
So for the waste that has to be stored, please keep it where it originated from and don't spread it through out the country. Sounds horrible, but in a horrible incident like the triple disaster, it doesn't come out all rosy in the end.
sveinnyves
it is sad but fukushima have to sacrifice it self. it is already contaminated and will take decades to or eons?? to lose its radioactivity, so its only logical to use the same site to store the waste. Dont spread the nuclear waste all over japan. I know fukushima inhibitants r sad about this but its the fact.
smithinjapan
This will be yet another example of the government saying they will do nothing without the consent of the people, then doing it anyway.
Star-viking
Good point by Zichi - the dumps are not going to be raising the radiation levels in Naraha much at all.
Also, the article does not make clear if there has been a vote by the town's citizens on this - it seems like the mayor has just decided that the dump is not wanted.
toshiko
Damien15: What do you mean to tell us Okinawa already have enough burden, move it to remote parts of coldest areas where there are not many people.