Fukushima clean-up may be doomed

Critics say Japan’s government is engaged in a vast, duplicitious and fruitless campaign

Today, a sweating four-man crew wearing surgical masks and boiler suits clean the home of Hiroshi Saito (71) and his wife Terue (68). Their aim is to bring average radiation at this home down to 1.5 microsieverts an hour, still several times what it was before the incident but safe enough, perhaps, for Saito’s seven grandchildren to visit. “My youngest grandchild has never been here,” he says.

For a few days in March 2011, after explosions at the Daiichi nuclear plant roughly 25km (15.5 miles) to the south, rain and snow laced with radiation fell across this area, contaminating thousands of acres of rich farming land and forests.

Japan's Liberal Democratic party which has led Japan for most of its post war period was the driving force behind the governments initiative to provide electrical power for its growing economy from nuclear power.  In bed with the major Japanese corporations who built these power plants they were never faced with scrutiny over their safety practices until the disaster at Fukushima.

Nobody knows for certain how dangerous the radiation is. Japan’s central government refined its policy in December 2011, defining evacuation zones as “areas where cumulative dose levels might reach 20 millisieverts per year”, the typical worldwide limit for nuclear power plant engineers.

The worst radiation is supposed to be confined to the 20km exclusion zone, but it spread unevenly: less than 5km (three miles) north of the Daiichi plant, our Geiger counter shows less than five millisieverts a year; 40km (25 miles) northwest, in parts of Iitate village, it is well over 120 millisieverts.

To this day both TEPCO the plant's operator and the government itself have issued contradictory statements concerning not only the condition of the power plant but over just how safe it is.

Disputed figuresRadiation levels in most areas of Fukushima have dropped by about 40 per cent since the disaster began, according to government estimates, but those figures are widely disbelieved.

Official monitoring posts almost invariably give lower readings than hand-held Geiger counters, the result of a deliberate strategy of misinformation, say critics. “They remove the ground under the posts, pour some clean sand, lay down concrete, plus a metal plate, and put the monitoring post on top,” says Nobuyoshi Ito, a farmer who opted to stay behind in the heavily contaminated village of Iitate. “The device ends up 1.5m from the ground.”