TOKYO: The UN nuclear watchdog chief will visit storage facilities for vast quantities of soil contaminated in the 2011 Fukushima disaster for the first time this week.

Japan’s government must decide what to do with the soil—enough to fill 10 baseball stadiums—scraped from the wider Fukushima region as part of efforts to remove harmful radiation. That is on top of the monster task of decommissioning the Fukushima Daiichi plant, which went into meltdown after being hit by a tsunami in the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl.

Rafael Grossi, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), will tour the plant on Wednesday. He will also be shown some of the 13 million cubic meters of soil and 300,000 cubic meters of ash from incinerated organic material. For comparison, the capacity of the Tokyo Dome arena, where pop superstar Taylor Swift performed last year, is 1.24 million cubic meters.

Japan plans to recycle roughly 75 percent of the removed soil—the portion found to have low radioactivity levels. If this material is confirmed safe, authorities want to use it for building road and railway embankments among other projects. The remaining soil will be disposed of outside the Fukushima region ahead of a 2045 deadline. The central government has said it intends to confirm the disposal site this year, with Fukushima’s regional governor reportedly urging it to come up with a plan quickly.

The IAEA published its final report on the recycling and disposal of the soil in September, saying that Japan’s approach was consistent with UN safety standards.

The Fukushima plant on Japan’s northeast coast was hit by a huge earthquake-triggered tsunami in March 2011 that killed 18,000 people. Although almost all areas of the Fukushima region have gradually been declared safe for residents, many evacuees have been reluctant to return because they are worried about persistent radiation or have fully resettled elsewhere. Stripping topsoil from the land was “very effective” to decontaminate areas close to waterways, said Olivier Evrard, research director at France’s Atomic Energy Commission.

“However, it also has many disadvantages. It had an enormous cost, it generated a massive amount of waste and still poses fertility issues” for agriculture, said Evrard, an expert on the Fukushima decommissioning process. It stands in contrast to the decision to fence off a large area after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster and more or less “leave it to wildlife”, he said. 

On Tuesday evening, Grossi met Foreign Minister Takeshi Iwaya, who said Japan would give 14 million euros ($14.6 million) to the IAEA for initiatives in Ukraine and other countries including improving cancer diagnosis. “At a moment where Japan is embarking on a gradual return to nuclear energy in its national energy mix, it is important that this is also done in complete safety and with the confidence of the society,” Grossi told reporters. — AFP