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<div>February 10, 2012</div>
<h1>A Confused Nuclear Cleanup</h1>
<span><h6>By <a rel="author" href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/t/hiroko_tabuchi/index.html?inline=nyt-per" title="More Articles by Hiroko Tabuchi" target="_blank">HIROKO TABUCHI</a></h6>
</span>
<div>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
“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?” </p>
<p>
A <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/d/day_laborers/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier" title="More articles about day laborers." target="_blank">day laborer</a>
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.” </p>
<p>
<font style="background-color:rgb(255,0,0)" size="6"><b>Nobody may really know how.</b></font> 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. </p>
<p>
It is far from clear, though, that the unproved cleanup methods will be effective. </p>
<p>
Even more disturbing to critics of the decontamination program is the
fact that the government awarded the first contracts to three giant
construction companies — corporations that have no more expertise in
radiation cleanup than anyone else does, but that profited hugely from
Japan’s previous embrace of nuclear power. </p>
<p>
It was these same three companies that helped build 45 of Japan’s 54
nuclear plants — including the reactor buildings and other plants at
Fukushima Daiichi that could not withstand the tsunami that caused a
catastrophic failure — according to data from Citizens’ Nuclear
Information Center, a watchdog group. </p>
<p>
One of them, the Taisei Corporation, leads the consortium that sent out
the workers now tramping around Iitate in hazmat suits. Consortiums led
by Taisei and the other two big companies — Obayashi and Kajima — among
them received contracts for the government’s first 12 pilot
decontamination projects, totaling about $93 million. </p>
<p>
“It’s a scam,” said Kiyoshi Sakurai, a critic of the nuclear industry
and a former researcher at a forerunner to the Japan Atomic Energy
Agency, which is overseeing this phase of decontamination.
“Decontamination is becoming big business.” </p>
<p>
The cleanup contracts, Mr. Sakurai and other critics contend, are
emblematic of the too-cozy ties they say have long existed between the
nuclear industry and government. </p>
<p>
“The Japanese nuclear industry is run so that the more you fail, the more money you receive,” Mr. Sakurai said. </p>
<p>
The Japan Atomic Energy Agency said the construction giants would not
necessarily receive the bulk of the future work, which will be
contracted out by the Environment Ministry. Company officials, however,
have indicated they expected to continue serving as primary contractors.
</p>
<p>
“We are building expertise as we work,” said Fumiyasu Hirai, a Taisei
spokesman. “It is a process of trial and error, but we are well-equipped
for the job.” </p>
<p>
Kajima and Obayashi said they could not comment on the projects under way. </p>
<p>
An Environment Ministry official, Katsumasa Seimaru, said that big
construction companies were best equipped to gather the necessary
manpower, oversee large-scale projects like decontaminating highways and
mountains, and properly protect and monitor radiation exposure among
the cleanup workers. </p>
<p>
“Whether you promoted nuclear or not beforehand isn’t as important as
what you can do to help with the cleanup,” Mr. Seimaru said. </p>
<p>
Other construction companies are scrambling to get in on the action. In
late January, the Maeda Corporation, another general contractor, won a
cleanup contract, this one awarded by the Environment Ministry. Maeda
bid to take the job for less than half the expected costs, an apparent
loss-leader maneuver to get a foot in the door that has drawn complaints
from other bidders, including Taisei. </p>
<p>
Early this month, a city just outside the exclusion zone, Minamisoma,
said that it would also allocate 40 billion yen ($525 million) worth of
decontamination projects to groups led by national general contractors.
Whatever the controversy, there is no question Japan is undertaking a
crucial task. The endeavor is meant to go far beyond the partial cleanup
that followed the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine, which left a
19-mile radius around the plant that, even a quarter-century later,
remains largely off limits. </p>
<p>
But there is little consensus on what cleanup methods might prove
effective in Japan. Radioactive particles are easily carried by wind and
rain, and could recontaminate towns and cities even after a cleanup
crew has passed through, experts say. </p>
<p>
“No experts yet exist in decontamination, and there is no reason why the
state should pay big money to big construction companies,” said Yoichi
Tao, a visiting professor in physics at Kogakuin University who is
helping Iitate villagers test decontamination methods on their own. He
is also monitoring the effectiveness of the energy agency’s
decontamination projects. </p>
<p>
Though big companies have won the main contracts so far, the actual
cleanup — essentially a simple but tedious task of scrubbing and digging
— is being carried out by numerous subcontractors and
sub-subcontractors, who in turn rely on untrained casual laborers to do
the dirtiest decontamination work. </p>
<p>
This tiered structure, in which fees are siphoned off and wages dwindle
each step down the ladder, follows the familiar pattern of Japan’s
nuclear and construction industries. </p>
<p>
On the Iitate project, most of the workers come from elsewhere. The
self-described amateur wiping down the school windows, who would
identify himself only as Shibata, said he was an autoworker by trade who
resided about 160 miles away, just east of Tokyo in Chiba. He said he
had jumped at news that there was “decent-paying work but not so
dangerous” in Fukushima. </p>
<p>
Mr. Shibata said he was working two four-hour shifts a day and was being
put up in a local spa resort. Although he and other workers declined to
discuss their wages, local news media have reported that the pay for
decontamination work can reach about 25,000 yen, or around $325 a day.
</p>
<p>
He spoke as he wiped a window with a paper towel. “One swipe per towel,
or the radioactive particles just get spread around,” he said. “Not that
you can see the radiation at all.” </p>
<p>
Indeed. A similar cleanup project at the Iitate community center last
fall, undertaken by the local government, was unable to reduce the
radiation to safe levels. </p>
<p>
The pilot projects led by Taisei and the other contractors have already
hit snags. The government, for example, failed to anticipate
communities’ reluctance to store tons of soil scraped from contaminated
yards and fields. </p>
<p>
Some critics, meanwhile, have argued that local companies and
governments could perform the cleanup work for much less money, while
creating local jobs. </p>
<p>
Some Iitate villagers have enlisted the help of university experts to
take matters into their own hands. Their experiments, they say, suggest
that decontamination must start on the forested mountains that cover
three-quarters of Iitate’s land area. </p>
<p>
“Even if they clean up our homes, the radiation will sweep down from the
mountains again and recontaminate everything,” said Muneo Kanno, a
60-year-old farmer. Like many other residents of Iitate, he stayed in
the village for more than a month after the disaster, unaware that the
radioactive plumes had reached Iitate. </p>
<p>
Mr. Kanno fled the village in May but returns on weekends to try
different decontamination methods. Recently he took Mr. Tao, the
visiting physicist, to a nearby mountain to test the effectiveness of
removing dead leaves from the ground to reduce radiation levels. </p>
<p>
There is no public financing for their work, which is supported by
donations and the volunteer efforts of the villagers themselves. On a
recent morning, about a dozen volunteers, some as old as 70, scrambled
up a snowy mountainside to rake leaves into cloth sacks, wearing only
regular clothes and surgical masks. </p>
<p>
“We know the land here far better than the construction companies do,”
Mr. Kanno said. “We are afraid that the money is just disappearing into
thin air.” </p><br clear="all"></div><br>-- <br>Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)<br><a href="mailto:art.deco.studios@gmail.com" target="_blank">art.deco.studios@gmail.com</a><br>