At the end of September, Tokyo signed an agreement to accept 500,000 metric tons of rubble from Iwate Prefecture, one of eight prefectures designated for cleanup under a new nuclear decontamination law passed on January 1. The law allows for much of the radioactively contaminated rubble to be incinerated, a practice that has been underway at least since the end of June.
But the sheer amount of radioactive rubble is proving difficult to process. The municipal government of Kashiwa, in Chiba Prefecture to the west and south of Tokyo, recently shut down one of its main incinerators, because it can’t store any more than the 200 metric tons of radioactive ash it already has that is too contaminated to bury in a landfill.
According to the California-based Fukushima Fallout Awareness Network (FFAN), burning Fukushima’s radioactive rubble is the worst possible way to deal with the problem. That’s because incinerating it releases much more radioactivity into the air, not only magnifying the contamination all over Japan but also sending it up into the jet stream. Once in the jet stream, the radioactive particles travel across the Northern Hemisphere, coming back down to earth with rain, snow, or other precipitation. Five days after the Fukushima meltdowns began, radioactive fallout from the disaster reached the West Coast of the United States. Approximately a week later, Fukushima fallout was measured as far away as France.
