Inside Japan's Deserted Zone
The Wall Street Journal reports:
FUTABA, Japan—In the Coin Laundry, a dryer is still loaded with clothes: an orange hooded sweatshirt, a green worker's vest and two pairs of jeans, damp and smelling of mildew.
At Joe's Man restaurant near the train station, a menu lists the lunch specials, starting with bacon-and-eggplant pasta in a tomato-cream sauce. A flyer on the open doors of the Nishio clothes shop promotes a five-day "inventory clearance" sale. Over the road that runs through the town center, a white-and-blue sign proclaims: "Understanding Nuclear Power Correctly Will Lead to an Abundant Life."
But life, by and large, is what is absent in this town, just a few miles away from the troubled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.
Futaba, once home to 7,000 residents, is one of eight towns forced to evacuate the day after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami damaged the nuclear plant. In the following days, tens of thousands of residents living within 12 miles of the damaged reactors fled. Last Monday, the Japanese government expanded the mandatory evacuation zone to encompass more towns.
On Sunday, the nuclear complex's operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co., said it aims to get the crippled plant under control with a so-called cold shutdown that brings down pressure and temperatures inside the reactors in six to nine months. Japan Trade Minister Banri Kaieda said some of the evacuees may be able to return after that but acknowledged it wouldn't be possible for all of them to come back then.
Futaba Mayor Katsutaka Idogawa, meanwhile, said it will be "years" before the residents of his town can return. The utility on Friday said it would begin initial compensation payments of up to ¥1 million, or about $12,000, to residents from an 18-mile zone around the plant—an offer some evacuees called an insufficient, short-term sop.
Police have established road blocks on Route 6, the main surface road running north and south through the zone. Authorities have declared evacuation mandatory for the area up to 12 miles from the plant and advised people who are six miles beyond that to stay inside. Police cars, ambulances or fire trucks occasionally patrol the towns inside the mandatory zone. While it isn't illegal to enter the area, it's strongly discouraged.
"What are you doing here?" a fireman asked a reporter walking in the street. From the passenger seat, another firefighter held up a radiation monitor. "You are not supposed to be here. It's dangerous," he said. "Please leave soon."
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