The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 17 | Issue 19 | Number 3 | Article ID 5316 | Oct 01, 2019

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Slow burn: Dirt, Radiation, and Power in Fukushima

Peter Wynn Kirby

Abstract

Amid the radioactive fallout of the meltdownsat Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Stationand across what would come to be known asthe Exclusion Zone, Japanese members of thenuclear lobby laboured to contain the politicalfallout of the Fukushima disaster. This articlescrutinizes the profuse rhetoric over recyclingas mobilized by nuclear boosters and the wideroperations of circularity in waste managementin Japan. Japanese leant heavily on the notionof recycling to attempt to frame the clean-up inFukushima in more ideologically convenientterms. This led, for example, to officialstrumpeting plans to ‘recycle’ over 16 millioncubic metres of radioactive topsoil scrapedfrom hundreds of square kilometres ofFukushima Prefecture, as well as efforts toachieve ‘thermal recycling’ by generatingelectricity from the incineration of collectedirradiated vegetal matter and the largeamounts of protective clothing and othermaterial used in the ‘decontamination’campaign. By scrutinizing this appropriation ofrecycling rhetoric and its leveraging acrossJapan’s nuclear waste management apparatus,the article exposes contradictions anddistortions in contemporary Japanese policythat have considerable socio-politicalramifications.

Keywords: Nuclear waste, radiation,decontamination, ethnography, Fukushima

Decontamination work, Nihonmatsu,Fukushima. Image credit: Peter WynnKirby.

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Radioactive soil depot, Iitate, Fukushima.Image credit: Peter Wynn Kirby.

Introduction

The record earthquake and tsunami that struckJapan on 11 March 2011 ushered in a highlymediated disaster as Japanese grappled withthe triple-meltdowns and radiation crisis atFukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station.Largely out of sight of international cameracrews and probing journalists, the Japanesestate and multiple municipalities embarked onthe largest radiation response effort in historyin an effort to restore hundreds of squarekilometres1 covered in radioactive debris. Thiscampaign saw about 70,000 Japanese workersremove over 16 million cubic metres ofirradiated dirt2—scraping topsoil off roadsides,meadows, wooded areas, agricultural fields,school grounds, residential zones, shrinecompounds, and parklands. Crews swept upradioactive twigs and pine cones, whittledexterior bark from tree stumps, and clippedlow-lying branches in an attempt to bringradiation levels down to allow resettlement oftens of thousands of evacuees. Workers garbedin protective gear, joined by volunteers,scrubbed and hosed down streets, pavements,stairways, kerb stones, and storm drains inurban and suburban areas. They also wipeddown the exterior of houses, apartments

buildings, shops, schools, and other publicfacilities, using specially treated wipes to cleanroof tiles, gutters, window sills, panes,mullions, wall cladding, and doorsteps. Wipesand protective clothing were collected forseparate incineration. This campaign alloweds t a t e , p r e f e c t u r a l , a n d m u n i c i p a lrepresentatives to record ‘safe’ radiationmeasurements in areas of Fukushima’s disasterzone—a major Japanese policy priority,particularly with the 2020 Tokyo Olympic andParalympic Games on the horizon.

Source: Ministry of the Environment,G o v e r n m e n t o f J a p a n(http://josen.env.go.jp/en/decontamination/); (accessed September 2019).

In parallel with these massive efforts to collect,or disperse, the radioactive fallout of theFukushima Daiichi disaster, the pro-nuclearJapanese state engaged in aggressive PR-management to contain Fukushima’s politicalfallout, working with the nuclear lobby to framethe Fukushima campaign in favourableideological terms. The scrubbing and scraping

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of a huge portion of Fukushima’s land areabecame branded as ‘decontamination’ (josen),despite clear contradictions described below.More telling still was the appropriation of theconceit of recycling to imbue the effort toremove radioactive dirt and other abominateddebris with flattering hues of eco-responsibilityand resource efficiency. This article3 scrutinizesthe decontamination campaign in order tohighlight the numerous ways in which thenuclear lobby has leveraged recycling inFukushima to sanitize and promote nuclearenergy throughout its mobilization on thearchipelago, with implications for other nuclearpurlieux.

Chimerical recycling

After spending decades as a perennialenvironmental villain through the turn of themillennium,4 Japan has transformed into acountry where waste issues and recycling aretaken very seriously. Japanese municipalitiesand industries recycle the usual stacks of paperand bins of plastic bottles and glass as well asbreaking down and converting about a milliontonnes of large consumer appliances (e.g.,refrigerators, washers, air-conditioners) a yearin highly automated facilities,5 part of what hasbeen called ‘the shredder economy’.6 Everyindustrial sector complies with Japan’s strictrecycling regulations, meaning that all mannerof e-waste, from vending machines to pachinkomachines, is dismantled, crushed, shredded,and separated to extract precious metals andother materials. These and other projectscontribute toward environmental objectives,but Japan’s resource-consciousness derives asmuch from a fixation on rationalization andefficiency, communicated via catchphrases like‘industrial ecology’ and ‘zero-emissions’production. Ironically, there is not muchconcrete, demonstrable circularity in Japaneserecycling.7 Yet circular-economy rhetoricpervades Japanese officialdom. It seems that

virtually every ministry white paper, urbandevelopment project and metropolitangovernment report trumpets its concern withsustainability.8 Due to the political ends towhich recycling is mobilized in Japan, mostegregiously in the radioactive spill of theFukushima disaster zone, this circularistrhetoric merits rigorous scrutiny.

While examples of discursive overreach vis-à-vis recycling abound in contemporary Japan,the yawning gaps and slippages in Japanesecircularity are most evident and striking in theofficial response to the Fukushima Daiichiradiation crisis, whose determined work crewsand complex logistics drive an effort that hasbeen every bit as much of a disaster, in the end,as the earthquake and tsunami that struckTōhoku in 2011. The Japanese Ministry of theEnvironment and its partners have branded theFukushima effort as ‘decontamination’; but asdemonstrated below, their use of this term ishighly misleading. Instead, I refer to thecampaign as The Clear for two reasons. First,‘clear’ (kuriā) is a term used by Japaneseofficials and others to declare completion of aproject or attainment of a goal, even though itsinvocation is frequently based on arbitrarybureaucratic targets and massaging of databelied by conditions on the ground (literally, inthis case). Next, those involved in the campaignwere physically attempting to clear away theradioactive debris that had settled on a hugeamount of territory; this was uneven terrain,including steep hillsides, forestland, andresidential areas, that would make such a taskexceedingly complex and difficult, if notimpossible. By declaring ‘clear’ on 31 March2017, Japanese officials were stronglysuggesting that radiation had been clearedaway, as it had been ‘on paper’ in ministrydocuments. Yet as demonstrated in the nextsection, irradiation of dirt, trees, streams,sandy l i t toral , and meadowlands is amaddeningly tenacious condition to attempt toreverse , and the rush to c lear awayFukushima’s radiation (and burnish its sullied

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reputation) within a tight, arbitrary timeframemade this Herculean task even more difficult toachieve. By appropriating the terms of exaltedrecycling to transform these millions of tonnesof radioactive dirt into ‘resources’, the nuclearlobby arguably made promoting this task mucheasier and more palatable to Japanesecommunities.

It may be difficult to recall with the crippledFukushima Daiichi leaking tonnes ofradioactive water daily into erstwhile primefishing grounds in the Pacific, but the conceitof recycling has long bolstered the nuclearsector. Ever since the vaunted promise oflimitless energy via fission became destabilizedby accumulations of radioactive waste from the1970s, nuclear elites sought to marshal thoseparlous residues in a drive toward greaterefficiency, as well as discursive control. High-level nuclear waste—usually spent fuel rodsfrom reactors—entered elaborate conversioninfrastructures, rationalized as ‘reprocessing’,to transform hazardous, depleted residues intopuissant resources. Perhaps the mostaudacious of these initiatives involved Japaneseplans hatched in the 1980s to transformplutonium—arguably the world’s most toxic anddangerous substance, with a half-life of 24,100years—into the pole star of Japan’s nuclearenergy production apparatus. Such a plutoniumeconomy would use fast-breeder reactors togenerate energy from the most hazardousnuclear wastes at a time when most nuclearnations were abandoning the technology asunpromis ing and/or too dangerous .Significantly, this fixation on plutoniumdeveloped out of Japan’s long self-perception asa resource-poor nation, a key driver of imperialJapan’s colonialist ambitions through WorldWar II.

Japan’s idée fixe over a perceived scarcity ofnatural resources has had a profound influenceon the nation’s development. The idea of Japanas a ‘small island nation, poor in resources’, orshigen shōkoku nippon, emerged as a powerful

discourse from the early twentieth centurythrough the Second World War.9 Japan’s 1960snuclear policy developed directly out ofmuscular hydropower initiatives that spannedthe trans-war period, where abundant energyresources were seen as critical to ensuringJapan would secure membership in the top rankof great nations.10 Japanese elites seized onnuclear energy as a strategic means to achieveenergy independence—paradoxically, of course,while being the only nation to have sufferedwartime fallout from nuclear weapons after the1945 atomic bombings of Hiroshima andNagasaki. As Japan developed through the1980s into one of the world’s most pro-nuclearstates,11 a powerful domestic nuclear lobbybegan to promote plutonium as a kind ofthermodynamic elixir capable of bestowing thearchipelago’s energy needs almost indefinitely.Lest this seem like casual hyperbole, consideran exhibit at the Aquatom museum complex,located near Japan’s showcase fast-breederreactor, called Monju: ‘Japan is a poor countryin natural resources … therefore Monju, aplutonium burning reactor, is necessarybecause plutonium can be used for thousandsof years’.12

Central to this campaign was the concept ofcircularity. Take the logistics that underpinnuclear fuel reprocessing, which involves bothelements that typify ‘recycling’ as well ashazardous externalities which belie its exalted,circularist trappings. Only by ‘closing’ the fuelcycle13 could Japan’s spent fuel residues betransformed into (and re-consecrated as) newnuclear fuel stocks. In this heady policy climatebefore the radiation crisis of 2011, recyclingcame to take on a peculiarly talismanic qualitywhen intoned by elite institutions invested withauthority and lavish funding, such as theAgency for Natural Resources and Energy(ANRE). Even the mere invocation of a closedfuel cycle could conveniently rebrand spent fuelrods and other parlous nuclear residues as‘resources’. Since these radioactive materialswere therefore to be reused, and were

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represented by nuclear boosters as a dizzyingthermodynamic bounty, the nuclear industryhas largely been able to sidestep the thornyquestion of, for example, containing suchnuclear waste in secure undergroundrepositories—generally considered bestpractice, if expensive and difficult, by mostmajor nations, with only Finland and the UStesting appropriate facilities thus far.14 Theseso-called ‘final repositories’ for nuclear wastewere, at any rate, deemed virtually impossibleto establish on the archipelago. Since thedevastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, noJapanese prefecture has wanted to host such apermanent nuclear waste repository,15 partlydue to the enduring, though largely dormant,stigma of radiation among Japanese after 1945.Moreover, Japan is so seismic that it would beimpossible to find a subterranean locationcapable of remaining stable for up to 100,000years (a verdict confirmed by an expert panelof the Science Council of Japan, convened afterthe Fukushima Daiichi crisis unfolded, in2012)—and therefore the task of convincing apotential host community to accept a finalrepository was deemed unworkable.16

For nuclear proponents, by contrast, there ispractically no such thing as ‘nuclear waste’ dueto the pivotal significance of circularity to thewhole rationale of nuclear energy in Japan.Radioactive material is instead viewed asresources—valuable ascribed commodities in asprawling reprocessing apparatus. Thisstrategic posture has furnished Japan’s nuclearsector with considerable latitude to sidestepthe very notion of perilous nuclear residues,long one of the costliest and most unpopularfacets of nuclear energy globally. Meanwhile,Japan possesses about 17,000 tonnes of spentfuel rods, most of which are stored on site atnuclear power stations in jam-packed pools,above ground, in a highly earthquake-pronenation.17 These pools resemble drab onsen,radioactive versions of the idyllic hot springsfor which Japan is famous, though these poolsare heated up not by salutary geothermal

currents redolent of therapeutic minerals butby the acute radioactivity of the spent fuel rodsthemselves, recalling the steaming, overheatedwreckage of the Fukushima Daiichi reactors inthe aftermath of the 2011 meltdowns.

The term ‘recycling’ imparts a sense ofeffortless, perhaps even endless, movement,dynamism, and highly rationalized process,particularly in the context of bold circularistdiscourse. But the overwhelming reality ofJapan’s nuclear regime is that of relative stasis.These pools regularly hold several times asmany fuel rods as any reactor, leaving themexposed, beyond standard containment, andtherefore vulnerable. Once deposited, theygenerally lie for years, steeping in makeshiftwet storage in the absence of a repository or aproperly functioning fuel cycle. (And, after all,only nine of Japan’s commercial reactors arecurrently in operation anyway, and only afraction are capable of burning the reprocessedfuel described above.)18 These components ofchimerical recycling are sustained by a well-funded and integrated programme of spin—anironic but appropriate circular metaphorhere—along with a multitude of political capitalwielded by wel l -placed inst i tut ionalpowerbrokers. Yet it remains striking how, in anation celebrated for high-tech innovation andexacting quality control, this recyclingapparatus has fallen far short of the circularistgrandiloquence propagated by the sector. Mostmajor nuclear nations have faced problems intrying to recycle, or ‘reprocess’, nuclearmaterial—an inherently dangerous and messyset of procedures that in the process createsabout 12 times more low-level and medium-level nuclear waste, by volume, than theoriginal volume of nuclear waste that was sentfor reprocessing—but Japan’s chequeredhistory with managing nuclear externalities isnotable, as explained in these pages,particularly when contrasted with Japan’slongstanding reputation for meticulous qualitycontrol and technological excellence.

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Japan’s decades-long quest for a closed fuelcycle has not only been exorbitant but plaguedby grave safety lapses and technical failures.Here, a few evocative examples of nuclearmismanagement suffice to convey thecircularist disarray in Japan’s ‘nuclear village’.The centrepiece of the nation’s audacious plansf o r e n e r g y i n d e p e n d e n c e w a s t h eaforementioned fast-breeder reactor calledMonju, located in Tsuruga on the Japan Sea.Named after the bodhisattva representingtranscendent wisdom, the facility operated in arather more mundane fashion. Completed in1994, the plant fell offline in 1995 after aserious leak of sodium coolant ignited a majorfire, causing extensive damage. A semi-governmental agency’s subsequent bungledcoverup brought infamy upon the plant, itsoperators and regulators, and the nuclearindustry generally. Monju was intended toburn, and in turn ‘breed’, plutonium from thespent fuel produced by Japan’s nuclear powerstations, but repeated attempts to bring Monjuback online within Japan’s aspirational nuclearfuel cycle failed. Having cost about $12.5billion, the facility was finally slated fordecommissioning in 2017 after havingproduced only a tiny amount of energy. Itsdecommissioning and dismantling areestimated to cost approximately $3.3 billionmore and take until the year 2047.19

Another key component of the nuclear fuelcycle was to be Rokkasho, a sprawlingreprocessing facility on a remote peninsula ofAomori Prefecture—the northernmostextremity of Japan’s main island. The Rokkashoplant, embarked upon in 1993, has never beenfully operational. Nevertheless, after over $12billion invested and a quarter century in limbo,Rokkasho has repeatedly been depicted as onthe verge of activity. The plant thereforeappears to serve as an expensive andunacknowledged semantic deposit on thenation’s whole programme of nuclear fuelrecycling. Particularly with Monju slated fordecommissioning, over the strident objections

of Japan’s nuclear boosters, Rokkasho remainsthe most compelling symbol of Japan’saspirations for a closed nuclear fuel cycle. Or inother words, without Rokkasho forever on thereprocessing horizon, the 17,000 tonnes ofspent fuel rods languishing in cooling pondsnext to Japan’s dozens of mostly idled nuclearreactors would be in danger of unfavourable re-interpretation: not as ‘resources’ to power thenation but as highly toxic and radioactivenuclear waste, a ponderous burden on thenation’s balance sheet and a damper on itscircularist aspirations. Significantly, the centralgovernment’s agreement with AomoriPrefecture stipulates that no nuclear residueswill continue to be stored at the facility if thenation’s reprocessing effort falters.20 Thisprovides additional incentive to keep upappearances, even as Japan’s fuel recyclingeffort lies in ruins—both figuratively and insome cases literally. (For example, the decadesthat Rokkasho’s facilities have lain idle havetaken their toll, with the vast conversioninfrastructure corroding and deteriorating innumerous places due to poor maintenanceinspections and general disuse.)21

Copious recycling rhetoric notwithstanding,then, a great deal of nuclear waste in Japan hassimply been converted into other forms ofwaste. Much is left to languish at differentmaterial stages due to what might be calledinsufficient circularity. Without the domesticcapacity to achieve its objectives, the nuclearsector has been forced to scrounge elements ofthis cyclical potential with the help of Europeanallies—a makeshift, stopgap measure that willno longer be workable in any long-termsense.22 For example, of Japan’s stockpile ofmore than 47 tonnes of weapons-usableplutonium (enough for more than 6,000warheads), all but 10.5 tonnes are located atreprocessing sites in the UK and France (withabout 21.2 tonnes at Sellafield and about 15.5tonnes at La Hague, respectively).23 Some ofthe MOX fuel rods, comprised of mixed-oxideuranium and plutonium reprocessed overseas

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from Japan’s spent fuel, have been burned in ahandful of specially calibrated reactors inJapan, but for the most part, the overwhelmingbulk of Japan’s nuclear residues remainscuriously unproductive—particularly so nowthat most of Japan’s reactors remain offline inthe wake of the Fukushima Daiichi meltdowns.Only through the peculiar rhetorical alchemy ofrecycling explained above do the piles of spentfuel rods soaking for years in pools withinnuclear power station compounds take on theguise of ‘resources’. With the Rokkashoreprocessing facility forever on the verge ofbecoming operational, Japan’s many tonnes ofspent nuclear material are thereby spared thedesignation of nuclear waste, a classificationwhich would usher in a host of thornyconsequences. For instance, Japan possessesfar more weapons-usable plutonium than anyself-respecting pacifist, no-nukes nation wouldnormally ever dream of having.24 Imperiouspostwar security guarantor the United Stateshas already signalled its displeasure withJapan’s wildly disproportionate plutoniumstocks, manifest most recently via a six-monthtermination clause in a key bilateral civilnuc lear t reaty govern ing Japaneseplutonium.25 If the nuclear lobby fails todemonstrate a more plausible justification forthis vast stockpile of plutonium, Japan mayencounter diplomatic and geopolitical obstaclesdown the road. This is particularly challengingbecause Japan has benefitted from a certainstrategic ambiguity with regard to nuclearweapons over the years. While remainingofficially pacifist and anti-nukes post-1945,Japan has nevertheless for several decadespossessed more than enough technological andengineering know-how to produce nuclearweapons. It boasts a well-regarded spaceagency, the Japan Aerospace ExplorationAgency (JAXA), that launches missile-likerockets into space. The mil i tary andgeopolitical ramifications of Japan’s enormousplutonium stockpile have therefore certainlynot been lost on prickly East Asian rivals likeChina and North Korea, who have long been

sceptical of Japan’s reprocessing rationale,particularly with regard to plutonium.26

Chimerical recycling has bolstered Japan’snuclear fuel-cycle strategy for a number ofyears, but it was only with the advent of theFukushima Daiichi radiation crisis that morenovel forms of nuclear waste materialized onthe archipelago, exposing serious inadequaciesin the nuclear apparatus and necessitatingofficial response. These include the estimated100 tonnes of radioactive water that leak intothe Pacific Ocean every day from the bowels ofthe ruined nuclear power station, as well as thenearly 1000 giant, serried tanks of Tritium-laced water slowly filling the 350-hectareFukushima Daiichi compound as effluent fromthe facility’s own filtration system—nowexceeding a million tonnes in total. (Referringto the highly toxic liquid residues these tankshold, even the environment minister himselfrecently stated that ‘The only option will be todrain it into the sea to dilute it’ to alleviate theever-increasing burden of radioactive waterstorage there.)27 Leaving aside the wreckage ofthe Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear PowerStation—itself a twisted and heterogeneousmass of nuclear waste requiring at least severalmore decades of highly specialised work todismantle and segregate—the trope ofrecycling has been invoked to mobilize, andjustify, the colossal effort to sequester andmake efficient many millions of cubic metres ofradioactive dirt and other debris brought on bythe 3.11 disaster. Ambivalent FukushimaPrefecture has, thus, become a pivotal testingground for the principles of circularity thathave guided Japan’s nuclear sector for decades,offering a useful opportunity to interrogate thecore precepts of nuclear recycling in evidencethere.

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Decontamination work, Nihonmatsu,Fukushima. Image credit: Peter WynnKirby.

Decontamination work, Nihonmatsu,Fukushima. Image credit: Peter WynnKirby.

‘Clean’ dirt ready to spread on agriculturalfield cleared of radioactive soil, Tomioka,Fukushima. Image credit: Peter WynnKirby.

Woman with dosimeter taking a breakfrom decontamination work, Nihonmatsu,Fukushima. Image credit: Peter WynnKirby.

S h i f t i n g g e o g r a p h i e s o ftranscontamination

A crew of seven men and one woman, cladhead-to-toe in helmets, face masks, protectiveclothing, gloves, and rubber boots wieldedrakes and shovels to scrape radioactive dirt andvegetal matter from a wooded area around alocal shrine in Nihonmatsu, not far from theExclusion Zone, in autumn 2015. The crewlaboured to remove enough radioactive debristo bring radiation levels back down towardleve ls deemed sa fe by the Japanesegovernment. This involved clipping off low-lying tree branches and clearing away smallbushes and undergrowth. (Elsewhere, in Iitatevillage, I have witnessed bark removed soaggressively from tree stumps that they hadbeen whittled down to resemble pencil-stubsgnawed by schoolchildren.) Yet in spite of theserious nature of the job and the tragicbackdrop of contaminated Fukushima againstwhich they worked, the crew were rather

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grumpy. Their foreman, Nakayama-san,complained about how low their pay rate was, apaltry 720 yen per square metre compared tomore desirable work around residential areas,called jutaku josen, which paid better mostlybecause it was calculated by weight rather thanby area. Having previously worked as aninsurance agent, the stalwart, outspokenTohoku native railed against the government’sstandards for calculating radiation safety,which he called too lax. ‘We’re mormotto(guinea pigs)!’, he declared, or test subjectswho could be studied for decades. He and hiscrew worked long and hard to collect hugeblack bags of radioactive waste for collection aspar t o f a campa ign tha t was ca l l ed‘decontamination’ (josen), but they were underno illusions that the area would be free ofradiation in the years to come. (Below, Idescr ibe how such workers see thedecontamination effort as extremely patchy ornon-existent in places, belying the campaign’svery moniker.) It also remained far from clearhow the problem of radiation stored in theselarge black bags would ever be adequatelyresolved.

Japan’s Ministry of Environment announcedvague plans for an Interim Storage Facility(ISF) for radioactive material in 2014, to belocated in Fukushima Prefecture, with moreconcrete plans by 2016. The proposed sitewould occupy already highly radioactiveterrain. Encompassing 1,600 hectares in a half-doughnut shape, the facility would literallynestle around the compound of the crippledFukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station,perched on Fukushima’s Pacific coast at theheart of the Exclusion Zone. Though proximityto Fukushima Daiichi suggests to a reasonablelayperson that the facility would hold high-levelnuclear waste such as the slumped uraniumfuel located below the power station’s wreckedreactors, in fact the ISF planned to store, for atime, the millions of cubic metres of radioactivesoil and other biomass collected from theirradiated territory of Fukushima Prefecture

since 2011.

It is central to the political culture of thereconstruction effort that Fukushima’s variousstorage sites for radioactive material clearlyadvertise their transitory nature. For sevenyears, about 16 million huge black bags(furekon), each about the size of a hot tub andweighing approximately a tonne whenfilled,28 have sat in piles scattered around theExclusion Zone. These furekon bags are filledwith radioactive topsoil scraped from thesurface of most of the prefecture’s hardest-hitareas, by crews like that of Nakayama-san, andat first lie in odd, desultory heaps of perhapstwo to six bags before being transported bytruck to what are known as kari-kari-okiba(third-tier storage, literally ‘provisional-provisional’ depots). After a time, sometimes ayear or more, workers will move these bags tofurther, though still provisional, second-tierstorage depots (kari-okiba) located throughoutthe region. All these sites, clearly blazoned astemporary, keep the bags in motion just enoughto sell a rationalized system, but in fact thebags still have nowhere to go. An elaboratelydesigned Interim Storage Facility, its namesimilarly advertising its impermanence, existsmostly on paper in the form of a series ofdiagrams and renderings, as Ministry ofEnvironment officials await cooperation of theaforementioned, tetchy absentee landownerswho, since 2011, find themselves holding titleto parcels of some of the most abominated landon the planet. Significantly, the ISF plan wasonly signed off on by the prefectural governoron the proviso that all radioactive materialstored there must leave Fukushima after 30years, at which time prefectural and centralgovernment authorities hope eventually tobegin converting the land to a park. However,such a restored future green space remains farfrom guaranteed, as does much of the facilityitself. By the end of winter 2018, only 52.8percent of the private landowners had agreedt o l e a s e t h e i r l a n d t o t h egovernment,29 meaning that implementation of

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the plan is largely beyond the power of thestate to guarantee. In the meantime, theoverwhelming quantity of bags of irradiatedmaterial mostly move around the chimericalcircle of provisional destinations, somewhatlike an intermittent game of pass the parcel.While, for a time, the state could put bags ofradioactive dirt almost anywhere during thedecontamination process, these bags slowlyaggregate in successive particular sites. Thesesites are generally leased from landowners andtherefore generate revenue.

A l l th i s mater ia l f lux invo lves longconcatenations of logistical steps. Movingmillions of furekon bags requires trucks, andthe standard Japanese truck can only hold amaximum of six of these bags. Therefore, totransport all the bags from the scattered siteswhere they were initially collected (gembahokan) to the subsequent sites of formalstorage—and eventually to the ISF—involvesover two million truck journeys, a staggeringfigure. 3 0 Moreover, according to themanufacturer, the bags are meant to last justthree years and some bags must also bedecanted regularly due to further routinedamage, bringing even more stutteringprogress. The scale and logistical complexity ofThe Clear has provided piecemeal work formembers of local communities as well as fortransplants, with some local companiessubcontracted to do scraping, collection,transport, and so on. This is, however, smallcomfort after the radioactive defilement ofhundreds of square kilometres of their homeregion, the decimation of Fukushima’sagricultural sector (even in relativelyunaffected areas distant from the meltdowns),the evacuation of tens of thousands ofresidents, nearly 8 years of upheaval, and ahighly uncertain future.

Improbably, authorities speak of ‘recycling’ allthese millions of tonnes of dirt. The most likelyscenario I have heard bruited by nuclear clear-up officials involves creating massive anti-

tsunami berms along the coastline, with‘recycled’ radioactive dirt comprising the coreof these structures for many miles. Based onmy decades of research on this topic inJapan,31 such a strategy is a long way awayfrom what most Japanese associate with theterm ‘recycling’. Under rosy scenarios of publicuse, such radioactive dirt would be sequesteredsafely within berms, but such strategies incurpotential risks of contamination of surroundingland and coastal seas, particularly worrisomegiven the periodic seismic events that joltcontemporary Japan.

Yet sustainability discourse in Fukushima goesfurther. Ministry officials are executing theirplan to incinerate all the vegetal mattercollected across and around the ExclusionZone, along with all the protective clothing(gloves, coveralls, masks, and so on) used indecontamination operations. Because Japaneseincinerators generate electricity from theiroperations, environmental officials andpartners dub this process ‘thermal recycling’.For deeply sceptical informants based incommunities around the Exclusion Zone, suchrhetoric often falls on deaf ears. SomeFukushima residents feel it is their duty toagitate against the environmental healthexcesses of this campaign, and I havewitnessed the gamut of such protests, fromactivists banging drums on a street corner inFukushima City to having a quiet word over teawith a local politician. For many others whoselives were turned upside down by the nuclearplant meltdowns and radiation crisis andsubsequent evacuation, the emotional toll hasbeen devastating. As one middle-aged womanput it, referring to the large black bags used forbulk transport in Fukushima, ‘The furekon arefilled with our tears’.

Problematically for nuclear stakeholders, thelofty goals of the decontamination programmeare undermined by the inconvenient propertiesof radionuclides, as well as by the uneventerrain of Fukushima itself. For there is no such

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thing as decontamination when dealing withradiation—there is only transcontamination. AsAssociate Professor Shinzō Kimura, a DokkyōMedical University radiation health researcherworking since 2011 in Fukushima, explained,‘Radiation cannot be eliminated. It can only betransported from one place to another…. This isclearly transcontamination, with no easysolutions…. Fukushima’s “decontamination” isa complete misnomer—it’s a con perpetratedagainst the Japanese people’.

Fukushima’s elaborate decontaminationprogramme is therefore, in essence, a matter oftaking radioactive debris from one part ofFukushima and moving it to another part ofFukushima. More precisely, the radioactivematerial enters stuttered slow motion, movingperiodically from one place to another, with nocertain final destination. By 11 March 2019, theeighth anniversary of the radiation disaster,only about 15% of the total volume ofradioactive soil (2.3 million cubic metres) hadbeen transported to the as-yet only partiallyrealized Interim Storage Facility, with a flotillaof trucks making about 1600 roundtripjourneys each day.32 According to the ISF planitself, much of the nuclear waste would be onthe move again in a few decades. Meanwhile,the supposed clean-up in Fukushima falls short,with too much radiat ion l ingering in‘decontaminated’ sites in question. Of course,true to form, Fukushima’s custodians like theMinistry of Environment have rationalized andtransported a sizable amount of Fukushima’sradiation—but by no means all. After scrapingup dirt and other matter, after cutting weedsand clipping low branches, workers spread alayer of ‘clean’ soil from elsewhere in order tobe able to take out a Geiger counter andproduce a ‘safe’ reading. In Fukushima, safetywas a lab i le concept , w i th s i zeab leconstituencies ambivalent about the aftermathof the 2011 radiation crisis. A number of thedecontamination workers I interviewed andwitnessed in action were sceptical that TheClear, across vast expanses of Fukushima, had

been wholly successful. They had seen firsthand the occasional patchiness of the work, theplaces where they or others had had to cutcorners due to the vagaries of rigid schedules,weather, diktats from up the food-chain, and soon.33 The Japanese government claims thatareas are now ‘safe’ due to Geiger counterreadings, but activists and others accuse thegovernment of putting their thumb on thescale, so to speak—taking many readings overtime and throwing out the undesirable highradiation measures as “failed” tests, therebykeeping only the lower radiation readings. Asdodgy as this may sound, I came across asimilar tactic used by the Tokyo Waste Bureauduring a successful community challengeagainst the Tokyo Metropolitan Government ina 1999 toxic pollution dispute. The independentscientist who had carried out the atmosphericmeasurements testified that governmentofficials had warped the data he had carefullycompiled, in similar fashion. 3 4 Whilec o n t r o v e r s y s m o u l d e r s o v e r t h edecontamination effort, weary communitiesattempt to return to normalcy, unconvincedthat the situation on the ground will get muchbetter.

Kimura-sensei demonstrated the absurdity ofThe Clear, energetically sketching out arudimentary farm on a white board in hisNihonmatsu laboratory. ‘The decontaminationactivities are a joke…. [They] scrape the dirtfrom the agricultural fields, but leave thefringes untouched. Cows then eat irradiatedgrass, becoming irradiated themselves, and shitradiation onto the “decontaminated” soil. Thiscan then contaminate crops over time…. Boththe plan and the implementation are acomplete farce’. Radiation remains most acutein the margins, in the neglected areas betweensites that have been deemed suitable fordecontamination. For instance, in communitieslike Naraha where only about 15% of the pre-disaster population has returned and resettledin the past couple of years,35 putativelysanitized areas resemble islands and

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peninsulas surrounded by eddies of higherradiation, particularly in wooded and/orovergrown areas, which the ministry hasrelinquished to so-called ‘natural decay’.Natural decay entails simply waiting for theradiation to go down by itself, withoutintervention. Caesium-137, for example, has ahalf-life of over 30 years, which means thatwhen the proposed ISF is to be shut down inthe late 2040s, the Cs-137 in Fukushima’s soilwill still be perhaps half as radioactive as whenit first hit the ground—still exceedinginternational standards, as shown below.

Take the northern area of Tomioka Township,which is still designated a ‘difficult-to-returnzone’—meaning that, on average, the areacontinues to emit more than 20 milliSievertsper year of radiation. (For reference, the USNuclear Regulatory Commission mandates amaximum exposure for American communitiesof 1 milliSievert per year over backgroundradiation.)36 I and collaborator ToshihiroHiguchi conducted ethnographic fieldwork onThe Clear, in Tomioka, before the evacuationorder was lifted there on 1 April 2017. Weexplored derelict neighbourhoods and thedesolation of its evacuated, overrun,intermittently bag-scattered terrain. We alsowitnessed the MOE’s clear-up of farms in theregion, where they endeavoured to spread‘clean’ dirt over fields and property to bringdown radiation levels. Northern Tomioka is apatchwork of some areas that test relativelylow on a Geiger counter and other zones thathave radiation many times higher, like thicklywooded areas, hilly precincts, even just theovergrown areas near roadways. This reflectsthe maddening variation throughout the rest ofTomioka and the entire area around theExclusion Zone. Forbidding teenagers towander in the woods or scolding children fordigging in the ground, and scraping awaysurface soil is far from decontamination—thisis, instead, decontamination for show,decontamination that is literally superficial.Furthermore, Fukushima remains teeming with

irradiated boar and deer who are heedless ofthe boundaries imposed by human nuclearfunctionaries, not to mention the multitudes ofbirds and other creatures who roam the area.Wild boar is a delicacy in Japan, but sinceFukushima boar have been found with levels ofCaesium-137 over 300 times Japan’s radiationlimit for human consumption, boar havemorphed from culinary treat into toxic vermin.Tomioka Town has killed many hundreds ofboar in recent years, but overwhelmingly as apreventative measure, not for their meat. WhileFukushima municipalities attempt to enlistgreater numbers of hunters licensed to shootboar to help control the infestation of thesedetermined radioactive interlopers,37 forexample, it is clear that this is selectivedecontamination by state fiat, finding littlepurchase on the disaster zone’s intricate non-human ecology.

Granted, one wouldn’t expect FukushimaPrefecture to advertise its radiation travails totourist visitors and prospective investors.Nevertheless, it is ominous that governmentproclamations regarding revitalization of thearea in and around the Exclusion Zone intoneabout jobs but seem geared toward a futurewith relatively few humans. The FukushimaPrefectural Government now promotes a plan,dubbed The Innovation Coast, that wouldtransform the unwelcoming region into athriving zone of high-tech innovation. Much ofthe development along the purportedlyrevitalized Innovation Coast would be directedtowards a ‘robot-related industrial cluster’ andexperimental zones like the Fukushima RobotTest Field.38 Both in the Robot Test Field and inother planned facilities, engineered runwaysand surrounding radiation-hit areas wouldserve as prime territory for testing aerialdrones for a range of purposes in variousweather conditions—which would be difficult orimpossible to achieve elsewhere in relativelydensely populated Japan. The planned site forthe test field would link with a secluded testarea about 13 kilometres due south along the

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coastline, located closer to Fukushima Daiichi,to coordinate test flights over the unremediatedExclusion Zone’s more or less posthumanterrain.39 Naturally, unlike Fukushima’s humanresidents, robots and the sometimes highlyautomated facilities that produce theircomponents would be oblivious to thee l e v a t e d — b u t t o r o b o t s n o tdebilitating—radiation levels found outside theFukushima Daiichi facility itself. In addition,prefectural officials have suggested that theExclusion Zone environs could play host to arange of other services that don’t require muchhuman intervention, such as long-term archivefacilities.40

Proud long-time residents of Fukushima, fortheir part, see all this proposed development asa continued ‘colonization’ of their homeprefecture by Tokyo41—namely, a well-wornpattern of outsiders using the zone for theirown purposes, as were the original nuclearproponents who built the ill-fated FukushimaDaiichi plant in the first place. Moto, a manborn and raised in Fukushima City andeducated in an elite Ivy-League graduateprogramme, lambasted the process. ‘This hasbeen going on for many decades. Again, wehave outsiders coming into Fukushima,dictating how to use our land, how to exploitour resources. They need to take account of thewishes of the people of Fukushima, how wewant Fukushima to be’.42 Moto and his family,along with neighbours, discovered in 2017 thatthe Fukushima City Council—facing massiveradioactive waste volumes—had arbitrarilydecided to use an open green area in themiddle of their community as a temporarystorage facility for radioactive dirt, withoutundergoing the usual elaborate consultationprocess.43 A university history professorcommuting to Sendai, Moto humbly proclaimshimself an ‘academic from the sticks’ (inaka)with no activist experience. Nevertheless, heproved himself an unusually capable politicalinfighter. He quickly mobilized his extensivelocal contacts in Fukushima politics to shoot

the proposal down within a handful of days,ensuring that the city would think twice beforeattempting to exploit the site again. Yet theproject was subsequently moved not far awayto another, less well-off neighbourhood,prompting his wife to say, ‘Yes, we are gladthat the project will no longer go forward lessthan a hundred metres from our home, but thepeople who live [in the other community] areless enfranchised, less able to protest. I feelterrible…. This shouldn’t be happening. Theyshouldn’t be doing this to local communities inthis way’. Many locals—even those who havebenefited from the upsurge in clear-up workafter 2011—have grown to criticize the wholeproject of decontamination. One notable turn ofphrase, josen yori osen (‘[it’s] more pollutionthan decontamination’), caustically juxtaposes‘decontamination’ (josen) with its nearhomophone ‘pollution’ (osen), engaging in aform of wordplay common in Japanese.

Naturally, sustainability and recycling figure inthe prefecture’s Innovation Coast plan.Promotional materials invoke the circulareconomy of recycling Lithium-ion batteriesfrom electrical vehicles into other energy-storage products at a newly completed facilityin Fukushima; another Fukushima plantpromises to produce all the hydrogen neededfor fuel cells with renewable energy, andFukushima Prefecture itself aims to derive 100percent of its energy from renewable sourcesby 2040.44 Fukushima stakeholders trumpet theputative synergies created by concentratingthese industries in the region; furthermore, alldesign studios, factories, and staging groundswould be governed by the same strict laws onprocessing and converting electronic and otherwastes as the rest of Japan. But despite theevocations of circularity along the plannedInnovation Coast, the scheme flirts withunreality as it brushes aside radioactive threatsin Fukushima. The recovering, tsunami-hitregion remains at risk. The millions of tonnes ofradioactive soil, the large expanses of defiledterritory relegated to ‘natural decay’—these,

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understandably perhaps, remain downplayed infavour of the opportunities presented by asprawling, relatively depopulated area of Japanavailable for experimentation with perilousdrone technologies and automated systems, aswell as abundant cheap land and tax incentivesfor newly built manufacturing sites. Zoomingout from such glossy public-relationsportrayals—made with an eye toward thecoming 2020 Tokyo Olympic and ParalympicGames—demonstrates the limits of thegovernment’s attempts at rationalization.Where nuclear waste languishes in variousstages of inertia/abandonment, the circularistnuclear establishment projects a utopiansystem, with materials forever floating alongtight, efficient loops of eco-conversion to feed aself-correcting market. All the while, the veryradiation that necessitates the clear-up helpspull off the PR campaign; due to elevatedradiation, the most dangerous areas outsideFukushima Daiichi remain depopulated andtherefore little scrutinized. Even the radiationin marginal areas that are legally accessibletends to discourage interlopers.

To be sure, all the dreadful externalities of thetriple-meltdowns in Fukushima presented herenotwithstanding, there are pollutant drawbacksto other forms of energy production. Toxic airpollution and hazardous tailings associatedwith exploiting coal energy cause hundreds ofthousands of premature deaths around theworld annually45 and depredate landscapes. Thesame goes for other fossil fuel exploitation,such as oil and natural gas/fracking, which dueto their vast scale and favourable margin havethe potential to warp entire planetaryregions.46 ‘Clean energy’ doesn’t get a pass,either. Production of solar panels and windfarms requires energy and material resources.Eventually, this eco-infrastructure will result ine-waste that wi l l need to be handledresponsibly. Ditto for electric cars, which, to adegree, will only be as eco as the forms ofenergy that charge their batteries. Yet theeconomies of scale triggered by nuclear

calamity reach a different order of magnitude,as Fukushima demonstrates. Communities inand around the Exclusion Zone will strugglewith radiation for generations, particularly nearacutely irradiated areas left to ‘natural decay’.Many of the evacuated communities inFukushima have been unsuccessful inattracting more than a small fraction of theirf o r m e r p o p u l a t i o n s b a c k f o rresettlement—usually about 15%—and thewhole prefecture must grapple with the stigmaof radiation that affects who buys Fukushimaproduce, who comes as a tourist, who decidesto move to the area, and who marries theiroffspring. Not to mention that Japan has failedto convince its citizenry that obdurate Nuclear,Inc., has truly learned from the triple-disastersabout the swift, durable ruin of large-scaleradiation events from crippled nuclear facilitiesand the cost of shoddy management andcareless quality control. Though the nuclearlobby seems largely unfazed in its push forreturn to the status quo ante energy strategy,the Fukushima Daiichi debacle has done roughviolence to the illusion of circularity andcontrol that the nuclear industry haspropagated over decades.

Given the broad significance of circularity toJapan’s nuclear sector, it is even more strikinghow recent efforts to ‘recycle’ nuclear waste inpublic works projects and in agriculture givethe lie to the eight-year circularist campaign inFukushima. In June 2018, the MOE divergedsharply from long-articulated plans to recycleradioactive soil collected in Fukushima. In arecently published outline,47 the ministryinstead set out to offload radioactive dirt inroad-building and agriculture in various sitesthroughout Fukushima—prompting vociferousprotests from community groups. For instance,along a 200-metre stretch of road in the townof Nihonmatsu, the ministry proposed to place500 cubic metres of radioactive dirt underneaththe roadway. The ministry explains that thedirt, having levels of approximately 1000becquerels per kilogram, would be covered

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with ‘clean’ dirt to block the radiation—smallcomfort to local farmers keen to advertise theirproduce as free of radiation, not to mentionconcerned homeowners and casual passersby.(For comparison, the Japanese governmentmaintains a radioactivity safety limit of 100becquerels per kilogram for foodstuffs forhuman consumption—though no one intends todirectly eat the dirt, the disparity between thelevels is resonant in an agricultural area thatlongs to become a major food produceragain.)48 Furthermore, officials intend to useradioactive dirt to grow crops withinFukushima Prefecture. According to the MOE,this ‘recycled’ soil would not, however, yieldproduce intended for human consumption,representing an (unsuccessful) attempt toalleviate the sharp concerns of yet more localfarmers and residents.49 Under Japanese law,soil of up to 8000 becquerels per kilogram canbe used for a variety of purposes, a regulatoryflexibility that government stakeholders areattempting to turn, gradually, to theiradvantage. By contrast, the InternationalAtomic Energy Agency maintains a standard of100 becquerels per kilogram for materialcontaining Caesium-137.50 Opposition to theplan from communities in Fukushimademonstrates the chasm between rosyprojections generated by officialdom and whatexasperated residents will tolerate. In a societybroadly shaped by recycling regimes, it seemsthat, after 3.11, there are limits to what formsof circularity residents are will ing toaccept—particularly when the ‘circularity’ ofFukushima’s nuclear waste dead-ends in one’sresidential neighbourhood.

Conclusions

The colossal scale of the clear-up in Fukushimabears perhaps inevitable comparison with othermonumental human endeavours, epitomized bythe much-bandied construction of the Egyptianpyramids. The mastaba-shaped waste mesas of

Fukushima, comprised of serried stacks ofhundreds of thousands of black furekon bagsthat loom over desolate areas in and around theExclusion Zone, may not seem as visuallyimpressive as, say, the Great Pyramid of Giza(weighing about 6 million tonnes and having avolume of approximately 2.5 million cubicmetres). Yet the eight-year project of gatheringup more than 16 million cubic metres ofradioactive dirt, transporting it overconsiderable distances, and eventuallyconstructing enormous ziggurats of furekonbags swaddled with enough tarpaulin to coverall the football pitches in the Premier Leaguemany times over does exude a somewhatPharaonic character. Nevertheless, what isstriking about The Clear in Fukushima is thatthis whole campaign is designed to achieveprecisely the opposite result. Instead ofconstructing a series of monuments out of themost durable materials available, such asgranite, to create a lasting memorial—as didthe pharaohs—Japanese governmentauthorities instead composed a succession ofgigantic (but slowly shifting) depositories thatadvertise their transitory nature. Thevicissitudes of weather and circumstancecontinue to take their toll, but the mostcommitted destructive force that thesestructures will face is their very builders.Off icials have guaranteed that theseradioactive plateaux will be removed fromFukushima Prefecture in less than threedecades. As regards the radiation therein, thegovernment has gone to great lengths todisguise, play down, or otherwise diminish thequantity contained in these piles. Whether toline the undersides of roadways, fill mammothberms along Fukushima’s coastline, or use inreclaimed land or other construction, nuclearofficials are determined to find ways to reducethe gargantuan scale of this volume ofradioactive dirt until there is virtually noremaining trace—contradicting the profuserecycling rhetoric generated in Fukushimasince March 2011. What this decontaminationcampaign does comprise, however, is a

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monumental glorification of Japanese models ofcircularity.

Circularist discourse on recycling tends toexpress the conversion of residues—eitherexplicitly or implicitly—as a seamless process,free of emissions or other externalities.Moreover, diagrams and other renderingsmake recycling appear not only effortless butas forever ongoing. Such exhortations ofcircularity become, therefore, less descriptionsof a process than expressions of a worldview,one that through its banality subtly creeps intogeneral consciousness. With both a powerfulpro-nuclear lobby and the 2020 Tokyo Olympicand Paralympic Games looming on the horizon,Japanese authorities will have every incentiveto make this radioactive dirt disappear in arange of inventive ways that have nothing to dowith recycling. Nevertheless, a veil ofcircularity will help colour, and obscure, thefamiliar process of converting nuclear wastesinto yet other forms of nuclear waste. Thistime-honoured exercise in nuclear PR will likelyperdure alongside the current revolution insolar power, offshore windfarms, and othersustainable energy sources, many of whose

rates already undercut new-build nuclear. Thewell-funded nuclear campaign to promotecircularity in Japan will then increasingly seemlike another problematic residue of the NuclearAge, one that will endure far longer than itreally should.

As demonstrated in these pages, the clear-up ofthe Fukushima disaster zone has itself been adisaster, partly facilitated by distortedcircularist propaganda. Yet recycling rhetoricpervades the nuclear industry internationally.We live in what could be described as ‘theenvironmental century’, with sharp concernover climate change, planetary depredation,profligate lifestyles, and access to resources.Around the world, governments, corporations,academics, activists, and concerned citizensare attempting to decide which forms of energyshow the most promise in turning our situationaround. By lifting the tarpaulin on Japan’shandling of nuclear residues in Fukushima, wecan begin to uncover the manifold ways inwhich recycling discourse is used to warp thecase for nuclear in a range of nations.

Dr Peter Wynn Kirby (http://www.peterwynnkirby.com) is an environmental specialist andethnographer based at the University of Oxford, UK. He is author of the book TroubledNatures: Waste, Environment, Japan (Hawai‘i, 2011) and recently published an article onTohoku and China entitled ‘Materialities Meet the Mangle: Electronic Waste Scavenging inJapan and China’ (Geoforum, 2019). Peter also disseminates his work in such media outlets asThe New York Times, The Guardian, and The South China Morning Post.

Notes1 T. Christoudias et al., ‘Modelling the Global Atmospheric Transport and Deposition ofRadionuclides from the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Accident’, Atmospheric Chemistry andPhysics 13, 2013, pp. 1425-1438; Majia Nadesan et al, eds., Fukushima : Dispossession orDenuclearization?, [no publication city], 2014, p.103.2 ‘Environmental Remediation in Affected Areas’. Tokyo: Ministry of the Environment, 2019, p.7.

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3 This article received generous support via a Leverhulme Trust Project Grant(RPG-2014-224). I would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge the kind help and sharpinsight of Dr. Toshihiro Higuchi of Georgetown University, who collaborated on someethnographic fieldwork on which this article draws.4 McKean, Margaret, Environmental protest and citizen politics in Japan, Berkeley: Universityof California Press, 1981; Huddle, N., and M. Reich, Island of dreams: Environmental crisis inJapan, Cambridge, MA: Schenkman Books, 1987; Dauvergne, Peter, Shadows in the forest:Japan and the politics of timber in Southeast Asia, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997;Broadbent, Jeffrey, Environmental politics in Japan: Networks of power and protest,Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998; Kerr, Alex, Dogs and demons: Tales from thedark side of Japan, New York: Hill & Wang, 2001; Avenell, Simon, Transnational Japan in theglobal environmental movement, Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2017.5 Shunichi Honda et al, Regional E-Waste Monitor: East and Southeast Asia, Tokyo 2016, pp.84-89.6 H. Kalimo et al, ‘Greening the Economy through Design Incentives’, European Energy andEnvironmental Law Review 21/6, 2012, p. 296.7 For example, many Japanese manufacturers eschew recycled metal or plastic assubstandard; instead, much recycled material tends to be sold overseas. See Kirby, P. W., A.Lora-Wainwright, and Y. Schulz, Leftover Lucre [manuscript in preparation].8 A comparison of Tokyo, Japan’s largest city, with that of much-smaller Kitakyushu shows aconsistent attention to recycling and sustainability in both locations (and in many otherJapanese communities). Creating a Sustainable City: Tokyo’s Environmental Policy. Tokyo,2018 See here(http://www.metro.tokyo.jp/english/about/environmental_policy/documents/01_full_text_in_english_1.pdf) (accessed September 2019); here(https://www.city.kitakyushu.lg.jp/page/waterplaza/en/what.html) (accessed September 2019);and here (https://youtu.be/rAOHomYuZ8k) (accessed September 2019).9 Eric Dinmore, ‘A Small Island Nation Poor in Resources: Natural and Human ResourceAnxieties in Trans-World War II Japan’. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University,2006.10 Amano Reiko (2001). Damu to Nihon [Dams and Japan. Published in Japanese.] Tokyo:Iwanami Shinsho.; Dinmore, 2006, op. cit.11 Martin Dusinberre, Hard Times in the Hometown, Honolulu 2012.12 Gavan McCormack, ‘Japan as a Plutonium Superpower’, Japan Focus 5/12, 2007.13 A nuclear fuel cycle describes a process whereby nuclear fuel rods are fabricated and then,after use, reprocessed so that some nuclear material that might otherwise have become high-level nuclear waste could instead be reused in reactors.14 The Finnish final repository, dubbed Onkalo or ‘hiding place’ (still under construction until2023), will be able to hold all of Finland’s high-level nuclear waste in a network of granitecavities 520 metres underground. By contrast, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) outsideCarlsbad, New Mexico, holds only a portion of the USA’s transuranic waste from its weaponsprograms. These pilot repositories, 660 metres underground, are carved out of a giganticsubterranean salt bed and could be expanded relatively quickly—as salt-rock is far moreeasily excavated than granite (see here (https://wipp.energy.gov/historytimeline.asp)).

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15 ‘Japan’s Nuclear Waste Problem’, Japan Times, 21 January 2014; also confirmed by severalJapanese environmental officials in interview between 2017-18.16 Kō-reberu hōshasei-haikibutsu no shobun ni tsuite. [Regarding disposal of high-levelradioactive waste.] (http://www.scj.go.jp/ja/info/kohyo/pdf/kohyo-22-k159-1.pdf) ScienceCouncil of Japan, September 2012; Japan’s nuclear waste problem(https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2014/01/21/editorials/japans-nuclear-waste-problem)(Editorial). Japan Times 21 January 2014.17 Yukari Sekiguchi, ‘Mitigating the Risks of Spent Nuclear Fuel in Japan’, CSIS PolicyPerspectives, Washington, D.C. 30 March 2017, pp. 1-2, 4; ‘Japan’s 17,000 Tons of NuclearWaste in Search of a Home’, Bloomberg 10 July 2015.18 ‘Nuclear Power in Japan(https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-g-n/japan-nuclear-power.aspx)’. World Nuclear Association. (accessed September 2019).19 Fuel removal work starts at Japan’s Monju reactor(http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Fuel-removal-work-starts-at-Japan-s-Monju-reactor). World Nuclear News, 2018, August 30. (accessed September 2019)20 Confirmed in interviews with MOE officials in 2017-18.21 ‘Japanese nuclear fuel reprocessing plant delayed yet again: Age-related decay plaguesRokkasho project, stalled for 20 years’, Nikkei Asian Review, 23 December 2017.22 The UK is no longer an option for reprocessing. The conversion operation at Sellafield,which grapples with dire cost overruns and its own very serious nuclear waste cleanup, hasbeen closing out its contracts and slowly shipping reprocessed waste back to Japan. Areva,which does reprocessing in France at La Hague, has been in severe financial straits and is notnearly reliable enough a partner on which to base Japan’s future nuclear waste policy.23 Status Report of Plutonium Management in Japan – 2017(http://www.aec.go.jp/jicst/NC/about/kettei/180731_e.pdf), Japan Atomic Energy Commission,Tokyo 2018.24 Gavan McCormack, ‘Hubris Punished: Japan as a Nuclear State’, Synthesis/Regeneration56, 2011.25 ‘Agreement for Cooperation between the Government of the United States of America andthe Government of Japan Concerning Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Energy(https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML0413/ML041350444.pdf)’ [civil nuclear treaty which came intoforce in 1988]; ‘Japan Plutonium Stockpile Fuels US Unease’, Financial Times, 25 June 2018.26 Gavan McCormack, ‘Japan as a Plutonium Superpower’, Japan Focus 5/12, 2007.27 ‘Fukushima: Japan will have to dump radioactive water into Pacific, minister says’, TheGuardian, 10 September 2019.28 Each bag is designed to hold a volume of one cubic metre.29 ‘Environmental Remediation in Japan’, Japanese Ministry of the Environment, Tokyo 2018,p. 22.30 Calculated and confirmed in interview (May 2018) with a Ministry of Environment official incharge of the Fukushima decontamination programme.31 Kirby, Peter Wynn. Troubled Natures: Waste, Environment, Japan. Honolulu: University ofHawai‘i Press, 2011.32 ‘Fukushima grapples with toxic soil that no one wants’, The Guardian, 11 March 2019.

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33 This is corroborated, for example, by Justin McCurry, who quotes a clear-up workerdescribing places where his crew was told just to sweep up the leaves on the ground to makea deadline, leaving contaminated soil behind.34 See Peter Wynn Kirby, Troubled Natures: Waste, Environment, Japan, Honolulu: Universityof Hawai‘i Press, 2011.35 ‘Learning from the Lessons of 3/11, Seven Years On’, Japan Times, 9 March 2018.36 ‘Backgrounder on Biological Effects of Radiation(https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/bio-effects-radiation.html)’, USNuclear Regulatory Commission factsheet, 2017. (accessed September 2019)37 ‘Wild boars offer challenge for homecomers in radiation-hit Fukushima’. Reuters, 9 March2017.38 ‘METI and the Fukushima Prefectural Government Conclude an Agreement on theDevelopment and Operation of Robot Testing Fields and the International Industry-Academia-Government Collaboration Facilities for Robots under the Fukushima Innovation CoastFramework (http://www.meti.go.jp/english/press/2016/0125_04.html)’ news release, JapaneseMinistry of Economy, Trade, and Industry, 26 January 2016.39 See here(http://www.meti.go.jp/earthquake/nuclear/kinkyu/committee/innovation/coast/2016/pdf/160713_01p.pdf), page 7 image.40 This was aired last year in interview with officials from the Fukushima PrefecturalGovernment.41 Norio Akasaka, Tōhokugaku: Wasurerareta Tōhoku [Tōhoku Studies: Forgotten Tōhoku],Tokyo, 2009.42 See also Kainuma, Hiroshi, Fukushima-ron: Genshiryoku mura wa naze umareta no ka[Debates over Fukushima: How and Why was “The Nuclear Village” Spawned in Japan?],Tokyo: Seidosha, 2011.43 ‘Disposal of contaminated soil – is this only Fukushima’s problem?’ [Osendo no shobun,Fukushima dake no mondai ka?] Asahi Shimbun, 7 June 2017, p. 14.44 ‘Fukushima Innovation Coast Framework(http://www.meti.go.jp/english/publications/pdf/fukushima_innovation2018.pdf)’, JapaneseMinistry of Economy, Trade, and Industry PR materials, Tokyo 2018.45 Air pollution, climate and health: the calculation is simple(https://www.who.int/sustainable-development/AirPollution_Climate_Health_Factsheet.pdf).World Health Organization (accessed September 2019)46 E.g., Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power. New York: Simon& Schuster, 2009.47 ‘Basic thinking on the safe use of dirt reclaimed [from Fukushima] (http://src.bna.com/zst)’,Japanese Ministry of the Environment, Tokyo 2018.48 Nokuaki Kunii et al., ‘The Knowledge and Awareness for Radiocesium Food Monitoringafter the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Accident in Nihonmatsu, Fukushima Prefecture’,International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 15(10):2289, 2018.49 A pilot project in Iitate would plant flowers and energy crops in fields with a radioactive soilsubstrate. ‘Environmental Remediation in Affected Areas’. Tokyo: Ministry of theEnvironment, 2019, p. 22.

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50 IAEA Safety Standards for Protecting People and the Environment: Radiation Protectionand Safety of Radiation Sources: International Basic Safety Standards. Geneva: IAEA, 2014, p.126.