NAMIE, Fukushima Prefecture--The radiation reading on a gravel path near a prefectural highway about 10 kilometers from the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant was 76.0 microsieverts per hour.
NAMIE, Fukushima Prefecture--The radiation reading on a gravel path near a prefectural highway about 10 kilometers from the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant was 76.0 microsieverts per hour.
At the nearby Omaru meeting complex, set among riverside rice paddies surrounded by mountains, the dosimeter recorded 52.0 microsieverts, more than 13 times the government yardstick of 3.8 microsieverts per hour used to assess whether an evacuation is necessary.
Shigeyuki Ito, 59, a Namie town official sent to measure radiation in the abandoned municipality, looked downcast. Officials had hoped to measure a marked reduction in radiation in the area when I accompanied them on a radiation survey on Sept. 2. Instead, I was advised, for my own safety, to return to the light van which had brought us there.
At other spots in the mountains in western Namie, radiation remains high. The levels in other areas are unknown because landslides prevent the town officials reaching them.
However, the picture across Namie, much of which was evacuated on March 12 after the Fukushima nuclear crisis started, is not unrelieved doom and gloom.
We spent the whole day visiting 38 sites in the town. Three town officials equipped with dosimeters drove from Nihonmatsu city, where the town's office has been relocated, as they do every Friday. They have regularly checked radiation at 17 locations since June 17, and measured at a further 21 locations on the Sept. 2 trip.
They say their weekly visits have shown a slight decrease in contamination and also wide variations in the levels of radiation in different areas. While radiation levels remain high in some parts of the hills, those on the coast and in urban areas in the east of the municipality are relatively low.
At the Tsushima Junior High School, about 29 kilometers from the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, the officials measured 11.0 microsieverts per hour.
Shigeo Yanaka, 58, section chief of the general affairs section of Namie's board of education, placed a dosimeter on a meter long bamboo pole held by his colleague Yukio Matsumoto, 40. As the meter was dangled above a school yard muddy from the previous night's rain, Ito scribbled down the reading and the time of recording.
"The figure was down slightly, but was broadly the same as last time," Ito, also a board of education employee, said.
In a corner of the yard, three two-meter-square blue plastic sheets covered the ground, part of experimental decontamination work begun on Aug. 26 by a company from Shizuoka Prefecture. Workers from the company sprayed chemicals in varying concentrations around the yard.
The officials checked the radiation levels under each sheet. The lowest reading was 8.6 microsieverts per hour, less than half of the level of the surrounding ground.
"That is significantly down,"Yanaka said.
"It is meaningless unless we get zero readings at a school," Ito replied.
The next location was outside the government-imposed 20-km exclusion zone around the Fukushima plant, but residents have been advised to leave because of concerns for their safety. The officials' dosimeters showed steadily rising radioactivity on the way there, rising from 15.8 microsieverts to 29.0 microsieverts and, finally, 31.0 microsieverts.
At the Karino Elementary School, about 12 km from the Fukushima plant, they measured 8.29 microsieverts per hour. It was used as an evacuation center in the immediate aftermath of the quake.
"About 1,500 people took refuge until the night of March 12," Matsumoto said. "We've got no clue as to the radiation level that night."
But at Namie Elementary School, about 9 km from the plant, the reading was much lower: 1.15 microsieverts per hour.
Once we crossed the JR Joban line, operated by the East Japan Railway Co., radiation levels were down markedly. The three officials, still clad in protective clothes, grabbed a 15-minute lunch inside their van. All of their homes are in the no-entry zone, but they are not allowed to visit them during the surveys.
At a building owned by the Namie Japan Brake Co., about 11 km from the plant, the officials recorded 1.32 microsieverts of radiation per hour.
The plant employed more than 200 people before the quake, but its machinery has since been moved out.
"We come here because we want the company to stay somehow," Ito said.
At Ukedo Elementary School, you can, on a fine day, see part of the Fukushima plant, which is only 6 km away. But there the officials measured only 0.29 microsieverts per hour of radiation. It was the lowest reading of any of the locations checked.
Although the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology has released figures for radioactivity in the no-entry zone almost weekly since April, those checks only cover 50 sites across the whole of the zone, including 10 in Namie.
Of the nine municipalities covered by the government's no-entry zone, Namie is the only one to have periodically monitored radiations levels in its locality, and its surveys show in unrivaled detail the complexity of the situation in the area, with some spots close to the plant showing much less radioactivity than relatively distant areas.
Shinpei Ueno, deputy mayor of Namie, said it was vital to monitor more locations as part of the process of getting people back to their homes.
But he also insisted that the government's approach could not be piecemeal. "Unless half of the town's population can go back to the town, we will not be able to restore its functions," he said. "It is crucial that government-led decontamination work should be conducted to put us in a position to allow the return of townspeople."
That decontamination has hardly started.
"For the past three months, we have observed only a tiny drop in radiation levels in our weekly checks," Ito said. "What is most needed is decontamination. We sometimes feel frustrated by the government's response."