A Confused Nuclear Cleanup

[IDemo]

By HIROKO TABUCHI
Published: February 10, 2012

IITATE, Japan — As 500 workers in hazmat suits and respirator masks fanned out to decontaminate this village 20 miles from the ravaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactors, their confusion was apparent.

“Dig five centimeters or 10 centimeters deep here?” a site supervisor asked his colleagues, pointing to a patch of radioactive topsoil to be removed. He then gestured across the village square toward the community center. “Isn’t that going to be demolished? Shall we decontaminate it or not?”

A day laborer wiping down windows at an abandoned school nearby shrugged at the work crew’s haphazard approach. “We are all amateurs,” he said. “Nobody really knows how to clean up radiation.”

Nobody may really know how. But that has not deterred the Japanese government from starting to hand out an initial $13 billion in contracts meant to rehabilitate the more than 8,000-square-mile region most exposed to radioactive fallout — an area nearly as big as New Jersey. The main goal is to enable the return of many of the 80,000 or more displaced people nearest the site of last March’s nuclear disaster, including the 6,500 villagers of Iitate.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/11/business/global/after-fukushima-disaster-a-confused-effort-at-cleanup.html?ref=global-home

[wtmusic]

1. The Japanese reaction to this entire fiasco seems confused.

I'd like to think that Americans faced with a similar crisis would be more proactive and organized, but that would be speculation entirely outside the realm of my experience.