Via CBC News: Fukushima residents question radiation cleanup effort. Excerpt:
Across much of Fukushima’s rolling green countryside they descend on homes like antibodies around a virus, men wielding low-tech tools against a very modern enemy: radiation.
Power hoses, shovels and mechanical diggers are used to scour toxins that rained down from the sky 30 months ago. The job is exhausting, expensive and, according to some, doomed to failure.
Today, a sweating four-man crew wearing surgical masks and boiler suits labours in 32 degree heat at the home of Hiroshi Saito, 71, and his wife Terue, 68. Their aim is to bring down average radiation around this home from approximately 3 to 1.5 microsieverts per hour.
“My youngest grandchild has never been here,” he says, because radiation levels in this hilly part of the municipality remain several times above what they were before the accident. Since 2011, the family reunites in Soma, around 20 km away.
For a few days during March 2011, after a string of explosions at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant roughly 25 kilometers to the south, rain and snow laced with radiation fell across this area. It contaminated thousands of acres of rich farming land and forests.
More than 160,000 people nearest the plant were ordered to evacuate. The Saitos' home is a few kilometres outside the 20-km compulsory evacuation zone, but like thousands of others, they left voluntarily.
When they returned two weeks later their neat, two-story country house appeared undamaged, but it was covered in an invisible poison only detectable with beeping Geiger counters.
Nobody knows for certain how dangerous the radiation is.
