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Regarding decontamination, some municipalities like Fukushima City have the city-wide decontamination plan and focus on particular areas to decontaminate. On the other hand, there are cases where the residents hire contractors for decontamination on their own. There are also active sales promotion by the contractors.

Disputes mostly rise from the latter cases. The Fukushima prefectural department in charge of decontamination has received a complaint from a resident who was presented with a bill for 1 million yen by the contractor who did the decontamination work for his residence. The department says it has received similar complaints.

Fukushima City has received inquiries from the residents about the cost of decontamination. One resident who hired the contractor to decontaminate for 200,000 yen [US$2,600] asked the city whether or not this cost would be paid by either the national government or TEPCO.

There were no contractors specialized in decontaminating residences, until now. Many cleaning companies and painters are entering the field. One building management company in Minami Soma City says, "If we calculate the same way as the cleaning of a personal residence, 200,000 to 300,000 yen per residence would be appropriate."Hmmm. Decontamination is not the same as cleaning, really. But from what I've heard directly from people who have witnessed the so-called "decontamination" in Fukushima and what I've seen on video, they are one and the same.

Blasting the roof and wall with power washer after more than 7 months may not even be enough to dislodge radioactive cesium, as Professor Yamauchi has analyzed. Even if it does, it simply moves cesium to somewhere else, like the neighbor's yard or onto the public road. Then, particularly in the case of Fukushima, the contaminated mountains and forests surrounding the cities and towns will supply radioactive cesium and other nuclides over time with rain and wind.But no matter. Money is there to be made, as near-endless supply of money flowing from the national government to "decontaminate" Fukushima and make people stay.If blasting with power washer does decontaminate, I am pretty sure Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians have done that long time ago.

Prime Minister Noda, whom you can see in the video in the previous post, won the leadership election thanks to his oratorical skills and NHK misreporting on the votes available for Banri Kaieda, looks absolutely clueless. Just as his predecessor, the whole thing looks way over his head.

The city plans to decontaminate the entire 110,000 households in the city. Onami District is the first to be decontaminated, and the contractors hired by the city have been working since mid October. However, the city felt it was difficult to proceed only with the government effort, and decided to call for volunteers.

Today, 110 volunteers that applied for the work and the area residents participated. They would do the work in the locations with relatively low radiation. After fitted with gloves, masks and personal survey meters, they went to the private residences or public meeting halls whose roofs and walls had been already washed by the contractors with pressure washers. They collected dead leaves, removed weeds, and put in new soil where the surface of the soil had been removed.

Volunteers came from from all over Japan including the Tokyo Metropolitan area, Hokkaido, Gifu Prefecture, and Osaka. Rie Koike (age 36) came from Kawaguchi City in Saitama Prefecture with her colleagues at work. She said, "The residents are in a different situation not of their making. I wanted to help them in any way I could."From what I see in the photo, this "decon" looks no different from the one I posted on October 26, calling the house and yard cleaning "decontamination". The difference is that there are radioactive materials in the soil, on the stones, on the house, everywhere, which the flimsy masks and work gloves do not block.

But the volunteers can feel good about themselves for their hard work, the residents can feel as if they've reduced the radiation, and the city and the prefecture and the national government save a good chunk of money. Win-win for everyone.I personally think it is unconscionable for the city to call for volunteers who are in no way trained in any kind of proper decontamination technique (if there is such a thing, that is). And to have a woman in the child-bearing age , like the one Yomiuri interviewed, do the work like this is totally beyond me.

In the "evacuation-ready" zone, residents are required to be ready to take refuge indoors or evacuate outside the zone in case of a nuclear emergency. The zone includes part or all of 5 municipalities - Minami Soma City, Tamura City, Naraha-machi, Hirono-machi, Kawauchi-mura. Currently, about 30,000 residents out of pre-accident area population of 58,000 have evacuated outside the area.

Each municipality will carry out decontamination of schools and homes based on the "recovery plan" [that it has submitted to the national government], and ask the residents who have evacuated to come back.Fukushima Prefecture will build new homes for the returning residents, Yomiuri also reports:

On the national government's notice that it will abolish the "evacuation-ready" zone by the end of this month, Fukushima Prefecture is finalizing the plan to build temporary houses in the 5 municipalities whose designation as "evacuation-ready" zone will be lifted. The prefectural government has started the selection process for the locations.

The houses are for people who lost their homes in the earthquake and tsunami, so that they can live closer to their old homes [i.e. come back from their temporary shelters outside the area].

The 5 municipalities are Minami Soma City, Tamura City, Hirono-machi, Naraha-machi, Kawauchi-mura. The prefectural government will ask the municipalities how many houses they want built. Minami Soma City has already asked the prefectural government for 400 houses.

"decontamination"? Good luck to them if the data from Watari District in Fukushima City is any indication. Professor Tomoya Yamauchi of Kobe University compared the radiation levels before and after the district's "decontamination" effort, and found that it hardly made a dent. In a place where the removal of contaminated dirt didn't happen, the radiation level doubled in a month, possibly with new deposits of radioactive cesium migrating from the surrounding area. Scrubbing the roofs and walkways with power washer lowered the radiation by 30% at most. (Professor Yamauchi's report is here, in Japanese.)

But the "decontamination" projects, which are usually undertaken by the neighborhood associations with minimal support from the municipal government's cleaning contractors, seem to have an effect of making the residents feel the radiation may have gotten lower because of their own effort, and that it will be OK to continue to be living there.A cheap, almost ideal solution for the politicians in the national government and the prefecture - decontamination by the residents, no need to pay for evacuation costs, a building boom for temporary houses creating jobs for the locals.

Hokiaido

Akita

Yamagata

Gunma

Saitama

Tokyo

Kanagawa

Toyama

Ishikawa

Yamanashi

Shizuoka

Aichi

Eisuke Matsui, a lung cancer specialist who is a former associate professor at Gifu University's School of Medicine, argued in his papers submitted to the conference that the victims of Chernobyl in the neighboring present-day country of Belarus have suffered from a raft of other problems, including congenital malformations, type-1 diabetes and cataracts. Matsui cited a lengthy and detailed report of research by the Russian scientists Alexey V. Yablokov, Vassily B. Nesterenko and Alexey V. Nesterenko that was published in 2007, and republished in English in 2009 by the New York Academy of Sciences under the title "Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment." Matsui stressed that, based on such evidence, the Japanese government should approve group evacuations of children — at the expense of the plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co. — from certain parts of Fukushima Prefecture. He cited some areas of the city of Koriyama, 50 to 60 km from the stricken nuclear plant, where soil contamination by radioactive cesium-137 has reached 5.13 Curies per sq. km. That is the same as in areas of Ukraine where residents were given rights to evacuate, Matsui said. In fact in June, the parents of 14 schoolchildren in Koriyama filed a request for a temporary injunction with the Fukushima District Court, asking it to order the city to send their children to schools in safer areas.

In the ongoing civil suit, those parents claim that the children's external radiation exposure has already exceeded 1 millisievert according to official data — the upper yearly limit from all sources recommended by the ICRP for members of the public under normal conditions. Following a nuclear incident, however, the ICRP recommends local authorities to set the yearly radiation exposure limit for residents in contaminated areas at between 1 and 20 millisieverts, with the long-term goal of reducing the limit to 1 millisievert per year. Meanwhile, Hisako Sakiyama, former head researcher at the National Institute of Radiological Sciences, delved into the non-cancer risks of exposure to radiation. In her presentation, she referred to a report compiled in April by the German Affiliate of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW). Titled "Health Effects of Chernobyl: 25 years after the reactor catastrophe," this documents an alarmingly high incidence of genetic and teratogenic (fetal malformation) damage observed in many European countries since Chernobyl.

Sakiyama also pointed out that the German report showed that the incidence of thyroid cancer due to radiation exposure was not limited to children. For instance, she cited IPPNW survey findings from the Gomel district in Belarus, a highly-contaminated area, when researchers compared the incidence of thyroid cancer in the 13 years before the Chernobyl explosion and the 13 years after. These findings show that the figures for the latter period were 58 times higher for residents aged 0-18, 5.3 times higher for those aged 19-34, 6 times higher for those aged 35-49, and 5 times higher for those aged 50-64. "In Japan, the government has a policy of not giving out emergency iodine pills to those aged 45 and older (because it considers that the risk of them getting cancer is very low),"' Sakiyama said. "But the (IPPNW) data show that, while less sensitive compared to children, adults' risks go up in correspondence with their exposure to radioactivity."

Further post-Chernobyl data was presented to the conference by Sebastian Pflugbeil, a physicist who is president of the German Society for Radiation Protection. Reporting the results of his independent research into child cancers following the Chernobyl disaster, he said that "in West Germany ... with an exposure of 1 millisievert per year, hundreds of thousands of children were affected." He noted, though, that any official admissions regarding health damage caused by the 1986 disaster in the then Soviet Union came very slowly and insufficiently in Europe. Indeed, he said the authorities denied there were health risks for years afterward. In response, an audience member who said he was a science teacher at a junior high school in Kawaguchi, Saitama Prefecture, asked Pflugbeil to exactly identify the level of exposure beyond which residents should be evacuated. While acknowledging that was a very difficult question, the German specialist noted later, however, that he would think pregnant women should probably leave Fukushima — adding, "I have seen many cases over the years, but I come from Germany and it's not easy to judge (about the situation in Japan)."

At a round table discussion later in the day, as well as discussing specific issues many participants made the point that science belongs to the people, not just experts — the very point that underpinned the entire event. As Wataru Iwata, director of the Fukushima-based citizens' group CRMS, one of the forum's organizers (which also conducts independent testing of food from in and around Fukushima Prefecture) put it: "Science is a methodology and not an end itself." In the end, though the citizens' forum — which ran from 9:30 a.m. to 10 p.m. — arrived at no clear-cut conclusions, organizers said that that in itself was a good outcome. And another conference involving citizens and scientists is now being planned for March 2012.

The information released yesterday by the EPA was limited to raw sampling data: The agency did not interpret the findings or make any attempt to identify the source of the pollution. From the start of its investigation, the EPA has been careful to consider all possible causes of the contamination and to distance its inquiry from the controversy around hydraulic fracturing. Still, the chemical compounds the EPA detected are consistent with those produced from drilling processes, including one -- a solvent called 2-Butoxyethanol (2-BE) -- widely used in the process of hydraulic fracturing. The agency said it had not found contaminants such as nitrates and fertilizers that would have signaled that agricultural activities were to blame.

Hirono’s mayor, Motohoshi Yamada, is among those staying away for now. In his estimation, the order from Tokyo – announced by new Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda – was made perhaps 15 months too early.

The final version of the recovery and reconstruction plan that the government was to submit by the end of this month was revealed on July 26.

The plan will include the research and development centers for health care and renewable energy in Fukushima Prefecture, which suffers damages from the nuclear plant accident. The government will support the recovery by sending the government research institutions to Fukushima. For residents who cannot rebuild their homes easily, the government will provide the "disaster public housing". The government will set up the headquarters for recovery and reconstruction on July 29, and formally decide on the plan.

In the final version of the plan, it is clearly stated that "the national government will be responsible" in recovery and reconstruction from a nuclear disaster. As to the decontamination of the soil and the disposal of disaster debris, the plan says [the government] will "take necessary measures". It also mentions the creation of facilities for the "world-class pharmaceutical and medical equipment research and development" and the "world-class renewable energy research" in Fukushima Prefecture, which are to attract the related industries. For the residents who have lost their homes, the government will provide the "disaster public housing", which will be sold later to those who want to purchase the homes under the scheme.So here's one answer to the question posed by a resident in the youtube video below that captured the confrontation between the Fukushima residents and the national government officials over evacuation:

"People in Fukushima have a right to avoid the radiation and live a healthy life, too. Don't you think so?"Well, the government needs them inside Fukushima for all these grand projects. Besides, the government doesn't care about that right for anyone outside Fukushima either.

"We are aware of the need to show our policy," a NISA official said. However, the agency does not appear to be close to deciding on where the contaminated waste will end up.

That delay has led to the secrecy among municipal officials. "It would be difficult to gain the consent of residents when we try to secure a waste disposal site," a Fukushima municipal official said. "The national government does not mention anything about how we can specifically cope with the situation under such circumstances." The situation is expected to worsen.

If Mr. Maehara has his way, the contaminated trees are to be cut from the contaminated mountains and hauled out of the mountains, disturbing the contaminated soil and dead leaves, and made into lumber in a village with high air radiation level and sold all over Japan with "eco-points", in order for the rest of the Japanese to help the villagers.This is "socializing the cost" to the extreme.From Sankei Shinbun (9/17/2011):

Seiji Maehara, chairman of the policy bureau of the Democratic Party of Japan, visited Fukushima City in the morning of September 17, and visited with the residents of Iitate-mura in their temporary houses. They evacuated to Fukushima City after the Fukushima I Nuclear Plant accident. In the dialog with the residents, Maehara apologized to them about Yoshio Hachiro, who resigned the post of Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry after his inappropriate remarks concerning the nuclear accident. Maehara said, "His words trampled down your feelings. As a member of the ruling party I would like to apologize from the bottom of my heart".

The purpose of his visit was to incorporate the demands from the disaster-affected area into the 3rd supplementary budget plan for the fiscal 2011, which will be the budget for the recovery in earnest from the March 11 earthquake/tsunami disaster. Maehara responded to the decontamination request from the residents, by saying "We want to appropriate a large sum for the effort".

He also disclosed that he [or his party] is discussing the possibility of utilizing "residential eco-point system" if residential houses are built with lumber from the disaster-affected area. After the dialog with the Iitate-mura residents, he met with Governor Yuhei Sato. Governor Sato pointed out the slow response by the national government, and urged the creation of the recovery fund.

Mr. Maehara will go to Miyagi Prefecture in the afternoon to have a talk with Governor Yoshihiro Murai. He is also scheduled to survey the debris clearing operation.To the right-leaning and the US-favoring (and nuke-favoring) Sankei, Maehara is a darling, WikiLeaks or not."Oh it's just outside of the trees that is radioactive. In lumber, there will be no radiation, it's safe" will be the mantra. "Don't you want to help the victims of the accident?" will be another.

Iitate-mura's so-called "decontamination" of farmland and houses is expected to cost 200 billion yen, or US$2.6 billion. Part of the "decon" bubble, as Iitate-mura's "decontamination" is to be done by the national government and its researchers (as if they know anything about radiation decontamination on a massive scale), with the help of large general contractors.

Another bit worth noting here in case you haven’t been following along with the work Safecast has been doing so far, surface contamination is much higher than air contamination. There are two main reasons for this – “Fallout” literally means this radioactive crap fell out of the sky and found it’s new home on the ground, and much of contents of said crap are beta emitters. Beta radiation is lower energy than gamma so you need to get close to it to measure it – which in this case is the ground. If you only measure the air you miss the betas all together. Anyway. Surface is higher than air, and around 3000 CPM on the ground in the parking lot here is 10X the air levels. As occasionally happens when we are measuring out in public, people approach us to find out what we’re doing.

People are curious, and often they are concerned. Hiroko Ouchi was both. On top of that she was upset. She said that she hasn’t been able to get any information about the levels around them, the levels they are living in from the government or TEPCO. She said at first she wasn’t concerned because residents were told everything was fine and not to worry, but over time people started taking readings on their own and hearing about readings taken by others that suggested things weren’t all fine and this really stressed her out. This area is far enough away from the plant that no one is being officially evacuated, which means anyone who wants to leave has to do it on their own and pay for it themselves. This has caused a lot of trauma in the community as some people leave and some people stay. Ouchi-san said it is very upsetting for people to be in this position and have their questions go unanswered.

Once back in the car we decided to head east and see how close we could get to the exclusion zone. We watched the readings rise and fall, though generally increase on the whole the further we went. We have a device outside of the car, and several inside taking readings. At many points we would see a 25% increase depending on which side of the car we pointed a device towards. Very quick changes in very small areas here. At one point things seemed to be increasing very rapidly and at much higher jumps than we’d seen previously. We were so distracted by the drastic readings that we almost ran right into a roadblock staffed by several police officers who were standing around in the street. We turned past them and drove down the road a short ways and then stopped to look at our devices which were completely blowing up.

On my last transatlantic flight I measured over 800 CPM on the flight. Seeing over 1000 CPM in the car was a bit shocking, opening the door and putting the device on the ground in the middle of the street and seeing it climb, in a matter of seconds, to almost 16,000 CPM was, well, I still don’t even know how to describe it. I was completely taken aback by this. We were maybe one city block from where the officers were standing – outside and unprotected and decided we needed to go back and talk to them.

We measure radiation all the time, and were noticeably shaken after seeing the readings we just had, and these guys were being told there was nothing to worry about. Suddenly some sort of commanding officer arrived and told us we had to leave and everyone stopped talking to us. Like turning off a switch.

The officers were very polite and happy to talk to us. We asked them if they were concerned that they were standing outside all day with no protective gear and they told us their bosses have assured them it is perfectly safe and so they have to trust them. We told them about the readings we’d taken just steps from where they were and offered to show them personally that the levels were incredibly high – they declined saying they needed to trust the authorities. Which was weird, because to most people – they are the authorities

We got back in the car and drove about 1km away the other direction away from the roadblock.

There was a small restaurant that was closed up and seemed like a good place to stop, take some measurements and talk about what had just happened

This restaurant had signs taped in the window saying basically “Sorry we are closed for an undetermined period of time. Will try to reopen in the spring.”

It was here that we took our highest and most concerning readings of the day. The parking lot of the restaurant was active, but less than we’d just seen. But when we walked across the street – maybe 10 feet away, we measured over 20,000 CPM and 9 µSv/hr. We pulled out our SAM 940 to try and identify the isotopes and found things we weren’t expecting at all. So we grabbed some samples to send to a lab for professional analysis and got out of there quick.

As we were starting to wrap up a car drove by and came to a quick stop. Two gentlemen got out, one of them was a reporter for Asahi TV and the other was Tadao Mumakata, a resident of Koroyama who is working on a way to produce geiger counters locally. They knew about Safecast and were excited to run into us. We talked for a while and then decided to go get some food before heading back to Tokyo. We stopped at a smallish family restaurant and talked about our plans and goals, geiger counts and what we’d learned – hoping to pass some of this on and hopefully help someone skip over some of the early mistakes we’d made ourselves. They were happy for the info and we exchanged contacts for further discussion.

around 2:30 am we made it back and started dropping people off at their respective houses/hotels. But no spare moment could be wasted. At the final stop we uploaded the log files from the bGeigie – the geiger counter we had mounted outside of the car all day logging radiation and mapping it against GPS points. This produces a map of the whole drive, and dumps the data into our full database, filling in a few more pieces of the big picture.

And it really is a big picture. These places have never had the kinds of detailed measurements we’re taking, and the measurements that have happened haven’t been shared openly with the residents – who without question are the ones who need to have that info the most. I’ve known this since we started the project but seeing it first hand today and hearing people thank us for trying and for caring was heavy. This project is important and I’m so honored to be a part of it, and so glad to have others involved who have done the impossible to get us this far already.

Please contact Japan cat network (www.japancatnet.com)( my friends David/Susan) and /or JEARS (Japan earthquake animal rescue) on FB as they are doing great work in that evacuated area and perhaps would be interested in a collaborative effort to get data and ensure animal safety.

The mayor, who fed 80,000 elementary school children in the city with radioactive beef, then went to an APEC's women's meeting in San Francisco and appealed Yokohama. (As what?) And she wants her official residence renovated by city's taxpayers' money.

He also said that spraying water with high-pressure washers hardly work at all on concrete and asphalt surfaces, as radioactive cesium is now deeply embedded in the concretes and asphalt. The only way to decontaminate concrete and asphalt, the professor said, was to physically remove all concrete structures - houses, fences, pavement, etc., which he said would destroy the neighborhood. He is of the opinion that all the residents in the district should be evacuated first, with the government paying for the cost, and the experts should get to work to truly "decontaminate".Professor Yamauchi also wryly observed the the word for "decontamination" in Japanese, 除染 (jo-sen), is misleading. Looking at the characters for the word, it does mean "removing the contamination". So by doing the "jo-sen" work people think they are removing the contamination, when all they may achieve is to reduce the level of contamination somewhat (not much, if Watari District is any indication). He even said it was as if the government was encouraging "decontamination" so as not to evacuate people.

Or in the case of Minami Soma City, it is as if the residents in contaminated areas could feel comfortable enough to remain there by doing the "decontamination" work, as one volunteer related in the US ABC News interview in August. "If this radiation is going to stick around here for five to 10 years, we have to learn to live with it,"she said, instead of moving away from the high radiation area. For her, shoveling dirt from the kindergarten playground was a way to live with "it".17,000 people live in Watari District, with beautiful mountains and water. It is dubbed "hidden paradise" in Fukushima City for the scenery like this