With thousands of bags of radioactive soil piling up, less than 1 percent of the land needed for interim storage facilities in Fukushima Prefecture has been acquired even a year after the project started.
With thousands of bags of radioactive soil piling up, less than 1 percent of the land needed for interim storage facilities in Fukushima Prefecture has been acquired even a year after the project started.
The mountain of paperwork in finalizing the real estate transactions and insufficient manpower are the main factors behind the slow progress.
That, in turn, could affect plans to have Fukushima residents return to their homes after evacuation orders are lifted.
Because the interim storage facilities have not yet been completed, thousands of bags of contaminated soil are stacked up in the open in parts of Fukushima. Until those bags are moved to the interim storage facilities, local residents may not be willing to return because of the high radiation levels being emitted from the contaminated soil.
The Environment Ministry and local governments in Fukushima Prefecture are continuing with work to remove soil contaminated with radioactive materials. As of the end of September 2015, a total of about 9 million cubic meters of such contaminated waste were being temporarily stored in about 115,000 locations around Fukushima. Government officials estimate that a total of 22 million cubic meters of contaminated soil will eventually be collected.
That soil will all be moved to the interim storage facilities to be constructed in the Fukushima towns of Okuma and Futaba where the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant is located. Total land of about 16 square kilometers will be acquired for the interim storage facilities.
Plans call for leaving the contaminated soil at the interim facilities for a maximum of 30 years before processing it somewhere outside of Fukushima Prefecture.
Land registration records contain the names of 2,365 individuals as owners of the land and buildings where the interim storage facilities will be constructed. However, as of the end of January, Environment Ministry officials have signed contracts with 44 landowners, or just 2 percent of the total. In terms of land, those contracts only covered about 0.15 square kilometer, which does not even total 1 percent of the total land that needs to be acquired.
Environment Ministry officials are trying to push ahead with appraising the land, but they face a mountain of problems as well as other issues unique to the Fukushima situation. In terms of land, about 10 percent is owned by individuals whom ministry officials have been unable to contact.
But in terms of the names on the land records, ministry officials have been unable to contact about 990 individuals, or about 40 percent of the total. Some of the people on the land records may be deceased, meaning that those with inheritance claims could run into the thousands.
Moreover, the lack of land appraisers with background about the Fukushima situation has meant that negotiations often have taken longer than expected. Some landowners also are hesitant about selling off land that has been in the family for generations, even if there are no prospects of returning to the family plot anytime soon because of the high radiation levels in the community.
In March 2015, the Environment Ministry began a trial project by leasing some of the projected land for the interim storage facilities and transporting in contaminated soil. Over 11 months, about 36,000 cubic meters of soil were hauled there, but that only represents about 0.2 percent of the expected total.
Environment Ministry officials are unable to put together a specific plan for full-scale transporting of the contaminated soil to the interim storage facilities because in fiscal 2016 only about 1 percent of the total land needed for the interim storage facilities will likely be acquired.
(This article was written by Yu Kotsubo and Yoshitaka Ito.)