Work to store tainted soil at Fukushima facility begins

October 29, 2017

FUKUSHIMA- Japan's Environment Ministry started Saturday bringing tainted soil in one of interim storage facilities for radioactive waste in Fukushima Prefecture.

Soil generated from work to decontaminate areas hit by fallout from the March 2011 triple meltdown at Tokyo Electric Power Co. Holdings Inc.'s disaster-damaged Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant has temporarily been piled up in some 1,100 places within the northeastern prefecture.

Shifting the soil and other radioactive waste to the storage facilities, to be finally built on a 1,600-hectare site straddling the towns of Okuma and Futaba, is expected to make it smoother to reconstruct areas devastated by the nuclear accident as well as the massive earthquake and tsunami that triggered the accident.

On Sunday, 36 cubic meters of contaminated soil arrived at the facility from a temporary storage in Okuma.

"I hope all tainted soil and other waste will be removed from living spheres in the prefecture as soon as possible," State Environment Minister Tadahiko Ito told reporters after watching the work.

But over 60 pct of the overall construction site remained to be acquired as of the end of September, and facilities to burn plant waste and store ashes with high cesium levels have yet to be built. Jiji Press