Reality of Decontamination Work in Fukushima
Decontamination around the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant is going on.
It is unbelievably exhausting work by human hands. The central government of Japan decided to carry out all-out decontamination work in roads, public facilities, agricultural facilities and fields, drainage structure, individual houses and affixed gardens, etc. around the Plant. The Ministry of Environment issued a guideline for this work. (http://www.env.go.jp/jishin/rmp/attach/josen-gl-full_ver2.pdf)
The central government has been directly in charge of decontamination in 11 hard-hit cities, towns, and villages close to the Plant. The Fukushima Prefectural office has taken responsibility in conducting or supervising decontamination projects in other 36 autonomous bodies.
They totally cover 235,208 houses, 5,335 km roads, 24,067 hectares of agricultural fields, and 4,085 hectares of forests and woods near residential areas or industrial areas.
Each decontamination task for a house, a field, or a section of a road is ordered to a vendor. A vendor hires workers who are expected to carry out manual decontamination work using some tools.
According to a rule the Government specified, each worker should record a dosage he has received in each work from radioactive materials. The allowable limit of a dosage per man per year is 50 mSv. In five years, the maximum limit is 100 mSv. As an ordinary person is allowed to be exposed to radiation up to 1 mSv per year, decontamination workers take a big risk on their health.
But as a contractor uses a subcontractor that might also hire other companies, it is not expected that this rule is strictly applied. What is worse, there is no legal penalty to violation of the request to correctly and honestly keep a record of an amount of exposure to radiation per worker. If a vendor has come into a situation where all the workers it employs have exceeded the allowable exposure amount, it cannot contract to do contamination work. Vendors would naturally put lower figures in their report to regulatory agencies.
The total amount estimated for this large-scale decontamination work is about $50 billion. Each worker is reportedly paid a day wage of $100 to $150.
In three years, many houses have been decontaminated or applied decontamination work to. And some towns have started to lift a ban on living for their residences. But, as a whole, decontamination in the Prefecture is delayed for various and practical reasons. It is expected that the work will be completed around 2017. Nonetheless, a decontaminated house does not show a state of decreased radiation at a level of a house, for example, in Tokyo.
As an example, a house in Naraha Town marked 0.85 uSv before decontamination but showed a decrease to 0.44 uSv after decontamination (while Tokyo records less than 0.1 uSv nowadays). They say that the work has lowered the dosage level by almost 48% in Naraha.
So, some evacuees are starting to return to their old houses located 20 km or more from the Fukushima Daiichi Plant as radiation dosage has decreased to some extent. But still there are 130,000 evacuees from their homes in Fukushima Prefecture due to the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Accident which was set off on March 11, 2011.
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Mar 4:11 And he said unto them, Unto you it is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God: but unto them that are without, all these things are done in parables: