Decontamination of Fukushima hotspots costly and complex

Poor Fukushima! All of that part of Japan will no longer be what it once was, a beautiful and safe are, not anymore, thanks to the corrupt idiot fools in the LDP and Tokyo Electric etc...!!

If you figure all the above in, nuclear reactors don't provide cheap power, do they?

In the long run it's very, very expensive.

Leave the radiated areas alone. It's hopeless "decontaminating". Spend the money on relocated people to actual communities.

thanks to the corrupt idiot fools in the LDP

During LDP's rules more and more is coming to the surface, it was DPJ which covered it all...

I'd say spend more energy on stabilizing and decommissioning the nuclear plant while at the same time taking your time and thoroughly clean the surrounding villages because no one will ever want to live in those affected areas until that plant is shutdown, if ever. As I posted on other social media, the world won't take action to help the Japanese government until the leaking waters used to cool the plant appear on the shores of California.

This is an ongoing operation.The reactors are still spewing radiation on a daily basis.Is'nt it senseless to keep decontaminating area that still is being affected? It will never be safe, it is a waste of money and manpower pretending to be cleaning somethingup that can't be.

thanks to the corrupt idiot fools in the LDP

During LDP's rules more and more is coming to the surface, it was DPJ which covered it all...

OK, but it was LDP which supervised the building and "inspection" of these things...

"In Tomioka, a coastal ghost town north of the Fukushima plant,"

The article doesn't make clear that there are two nuclear power stations, daiichi and daiini. There is no "the Fukushima plant" and for those familiar with the area makes for frustrating reading.

Stupidity beyond belief!

The nuke plant is still spewing radiation all over the place, and they're scrubbing the streets.

How does this make any kind of sense? This is common sense.

No whitewashing this one..

I lived in my Japanese in-law's mountain house 1.5km "around the corner of the mountain" from Miyakoji-mura, in Tamura-shi, from 2007 till 2008, with my wife and our son. This house is about 21km due-east of the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant. In 2008 we bought a house in Tobu New Town which is right on the eastern outskirts of Koriyama and borders with Miharu, and we loved the house and the surrounding area - by that time we had made lots of friends and I had been helping to teach English both in Miyakoji and Miharu. Shortly after buying the house I managed to find an IT job and worked there over the next few years.

Then the quake happened on March 11th 2011, and subsequently the Fukushima Dai-ichi disaster. I managed to obtain a geiger-counter about 4 weeks after the nuke plant went foom, and also paid close attention to the weather/wind patterns at the time. During those 4-5 weeks of food and gasoline rationing. (I ended up waking up at 4am a couple of times to drive down to my usual gas station to queue up to obtain a voucher, then buy a maximum of 2000 Yen worth of gasoline later that afternoon).

We were almost going to evacuate to a friend's place in Kyoto during that time, but, it turned out that the wind patterns and direction had blown the radioactive plume north-westwards from Dai-ichi almost directly to Fukushima city, and then turned south-westwards after that. The result of that was that most of the plume missed Tobu New Town by about 4-5km and we decided to bug-in until either the situation improved or we ran out of supplies. We had plenty of supplies because weirdly enough about a year before the disaster I had strongly started prepping for SHTF situations.

Anyway, about May 2011 I made a trip back to my in-law's mountain house with my geiger-counter to see what the radiation levels were like there. It was increasingly very,very spooky driving towards Miyakoji up route 288, as from about the town of Tokiwa onwards things started to get very quiet - the people living there had been evacuated or had fled the area themselves. The village of Iwaisawa was a ghost town. Eventually I reached the mountain house. I was measuring about 0.5 uSv/hr in the house, and outside, but with the odd spike which sent the geiger-counter bleeping away and it registering 1.5+ uSv/hr, so, it seemed it had mostly escaped the worst of the plume as well. I did measure a lot of hotspots around the area though, but nothing life-threatening, and after an hour or so decided it was better to get back out.

Ironically enough I was measuring much bigger amounts of radiation on the lawn of a friend's house. He and his family lived quite close to the center of Koriyama city - I was measuring more than 8 uSv/hr at ground level on his lawn - I didn't hang around there for long.

Anyway my point is this - a year later and most people were not prepared to move back into Miyakoji. The terrain there is mountainous and it will be almost impossible to clean radioactive soil there from the mountains, where I know for a fact there are plenty of pretty high-radiation hotspots. I can envisage water run-off from the mountains getting into the streams and rivers there - you'd have to scrape the soil and trees and vines off the mountains before making a dent in the radiation levels on there. And then there's the numerous rice fields in the valleys, which are supplied by the water run-off from the mountains - these are going to be unusable for numerous decades.

I've since then taken my wife and son completely out of Japan and we moved to my native Scotland at the beginning of this year - I had had enough of worrying about our future in Japan - coping with the quake and the nuclear disaster really dented my confidence at the time. Oh and I lost my job in August 2011 due to the western company I was working for losing all confidence in having a presence in Koriyama, then there was the long term worry about my son's future - and I suspect that within the next decade or so there's going to be a major quake hitting Tokyo, which will further put Japan in the doldrums. I have no plans to return to Japan.

Thanks, TEPCO! Now let's get those plants back up and running!

Decontamination of Fukushima hotspots costly and complex

And bungled and futile.

When will TEPCO and the government stop talking about this disaster as if it were a wine stain on a reasonably expensive rug? As commented above, funds would be better spent relocating people.

I'm so sorry for the people of this once beautiful and awsome agricultural area of the world, their government will not face the facts and want to still kamakazi the people to save face with the world and the greed spills from there mouths , but soon enough this will get to big to ignore and the people will know for sure what this disaster really means for the country as a whole, and to the rest of the world.

Ok the time for mourning is over! Its time for common bloody sense to kick in.

These stupid "clean up" activities must stop, they are not working, they will NOT work all they are doing is just moving radioactive materials around, the stuff is STILL THERE, it doesn't go away you cant just clean it up.

The govt needs to shut down these areas, leave them be & let nature take its course, & re-locate those affected to new places to live & start again, THATS IT, now get to it!

Most of these towns will never recover, most likely should not even attempt to be lived in anymore, time for reality not stupid fantasy!

This is WAY, WAY, worse than the main stream media is reporting. They are going to attempt to remove thousands of fuel rods, and if any one of those breaks or is mishandled, it will release 40,000 TIMES the radiation of Hiroshima. They've practiced with a few successfully, but there aren't too many people who believe they can remove all of them (over the next few years) without a hitch.

Then there's this:

RT interviews fallout researcher Christina Consolo, who says that if Japan continues on its course of doing nothing, then years of "duct tape fixes" could result in millions of death.

Source:

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-08-17/radioactive-water-leaking-fukushima-what-we-know

This pretty much sums it up.

We have three 100-ton melted fuel blobs underground, but where exactly they are located, no one knows. Whatever 'barriers' TEPCO has put in place so far have failed. Efforts to decontaminate radioactive water have failed. Robots have failed. Camera equipment and temperature gauges...failed. Decontamination of surrounding cities has failed.

RT news interview with fallout researcher Christina Consolo

Why are the executives of TEPCO at the time of the disaster not being held accountable for it?

Arrest, prosecute and incarcerate them. Strip them and their families of all assets and cash derived from profiteering at TEPCO. Backdate it to March 10th, 2011 so any monies or assets transferred will be collected. Donate the monies to disaster relief and the families affected by the tragedies. Thanks guys, how generous of you. Ignore numbers 1 through 3. Haven't you heard of Capitalism? The worst they could expect in Japan would be a suspended sentence but they have already been absolved of blame. Get over it!

Japanese including Okinawa people have a strong attachment to their family land. Unlike others who in truth rent it from the government. That is why they want their land back, that is why I want my land back! The government rules are too strict as they "assume" too much. Of course while this is bad any atomic war would be much much worse.

Of course while this is bad an alien invasion would be much much worse.

what do they mean by decades? Half life of some radioactive materials is 35,000 years. Maybe they should report 3500 decades?

millenia would be more appropriate. it also describes how long it will take for tepco to get out of their holes and take responsibility.

So, after two and a half years they still have no plan or any idea how to deal with it. WTF are these wombats doing? I am so very glad I am not one of the people relying on these twits to rebuild my life, but I am also confused as to these people are taking all this apathetic crap from TEPCO. Their lack of action infuriates me and I am not relying on TEPCO for anything, except increasing my power bill, of course.

The lower half of nearby forest slopes were stripped of saplings and shrubbery. “That’s lovely,” Yokota told a visitor. “They’ve got it nice and clean.”

facepalm ... these guys are supposedly "experts", but anyone who read any of the academic papers after Chernobyl knows that the best way to cleanup radiation across a large area is biological. Grow a mass of fast growing plants, the cesium bonds to their cells in small quantities, then harvest and repeat. Seed the area with tons of earthworms, which move through the soil and pick up radiative particles, then stick some electrodes into the ground, force them to surface, scoop them up and dispose of them and repeat.

Cutting down everything in sight? That does nothing to actually clean up the radiation in the long term.

Many said from the start, it's a disaster! 2 and a half years latter the scale of the disaster is seeping out. Washing the streets does nothing except put temp workers in danger. It's still spewing into the air and sea. The response from the government is worse then pathetic. TEPCO have no idea and no concence. It disgusting and has only a mitigating factor of going to get more disgusting and vile. Japan is looking at becoming a toxic and vile group of islands. Stupidity on a scale never seen before.

The plant we politely call the "Daiichi Plant" is actually the "General Electric Mark 1 Nuclear Plant", built by General Electric of the United States (only the outer shell of the building is Japanese made). The design was once declared unsafe by the US Atomic Energy Commision, but GE said it had a fix, so TEPCO stopped its suit. This is kind of the third atom bomb.

OK, but it was LDP which supervised the building and "inspection" of these things...

Great argument, indeed. Is there a thing in Japan which LDP isn't responsibile for?

If everyone involved with this power plant had actually done their job 2 years ago, none of this would've happened. This is exactly what happens when the government acts like children. You get a bigger mess.

Great argument, indeed. Is there a thing in Japan which LDP isn't responsibile for?

Yes. But in this case, the LDP was in the government that put together the so called nuclear regulatory that was supposed to be ensuring that everything was safe. The same government that essentially bullied people who predicted a 10M+ tsunami that would cause a meltdown into being quiet, as no one wanted to hear that. The same government that has taken zero responsibility for what happened.

So the LDP isn't responsible for everything, but they are most definitely responsible for this.

Decontamination of Fukushima hotspots costly and complex

Ah? What a surprise!

Japan’s plan to scrub clean the area around Fukushima and remove radioactive debris was beset by difficulties from the beginning.

And Japan is still trying to scrubbing and cleaning indefinitely. This story reminds me a film of Kurosawa-Woman in the Dunes. She was sweeping the dunes over and over and over.in the wind.... "Existential" .

Strangerland

The same government that essentially bullied people who predicted a 10M+ tsunami that would cause a meltdown into being quiet.

That is the first I have heard of that. Do you have a reference for it?

It's just upsetting that it took them this long to realize that it's a costly and complex issue. And it's worse now because they sat on their butts doing nothing about it. Shame on TEPCO and shame on GOJ for letting it get this far.

For those of you in Tokyo (or anywhere else in Japan), are you worried that this out-of-control radiation will affect your health? Your kids?

How is it possible for the Japanese to 'scrub' trees,forest floors,mountains etc? When radioactively contaminated flora is collected it has to be stored-where is it being stored? Japan doesn't have any storage facilities,right? When houses are sprayed with water then radioactive water flows into drains then into rivers and streams for the radioactivity to concentrate downstream where it is absorbed by microorganisms back into the food chain back to us ad infinitum.....

For those of you in Tokyo (or anywhere else in Japan), are you worried that this out-of-control radiation will affect your health? Your kids?

That's what I would like to know. I wonder if they are told the truth what's going on.

As for safety in Tokyo or anywhere in Japan, since lots of people don't trust the government, many internet sites were set up by private citizens (Japanese and non-Japanese) after the disaster at which they displayed their own counts on their docimeters. Within a few months, most of the sites closed because their numbers were consistently lower than the government numbers (not a great case for conspiracy). You can google these sites (including one on Facebook, if it is still going). Also, remember that besides the government, all hospitals and universities and companies that use radiation equipment have radiation measuring devices. If these people start fleeing Japan, then you know something is wrong. Until then, don't be so paranoid.

Good points, gokai_wo_maneku, but you can't blame people for being paranoid when for 2 years they were being told that everything was under control and there was nothing to worry about, yet now they know they were being lied to, and on an almost daily basis, worrying news is coming out about Fukushima. With such a lack of transparency you'd be mad not to question, 'Well, how bad is it really?'.

@Francis, I completely agree that the whole situation smells completely rotten. I was only talking about safety in Tokyo now, and not saying anything about the possibility that it could get worse sometime in the future.

Thanks gokai and Francis for the response. I live in Tokyo and while I'm not too worried (not yet, anyway), I do worry about my kids. These TEPCO fools and GOJ fools now can lie out of their teeth and they won't be held accountable for because by the time things really get ugly, they'll be hella old and/or dead already. So then it's gonna be up to the "newer" leadership to clean up their mess.

Dealing with panic is, without a doubt, not a good thing but lying and slowing killing the Japanese populace is much, much worse.