The plan to build interim facilities to store contaminated soil and other radioactive waste from the cleanup efforts in Fukushima Prefecture finally appears to be moving forward now that local authorities have singled out two municipalities as storage sites.
While the construction of waste storage facilities is expected to speed up the lagging decontamination efforts that are vital to the reconstruction of the areas hit by the 2011 nuclear disaster, the government needs to realize that it will be a painful step for the thousands of local residents, who had their livelihood destroyed by the crisis, to now have to give up their land.
Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, which suffered triple meltdowns in the wake of the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami, straddles the towns of Okuma and Futaba. Among the many communities in Fukushima affected by the disaster, most of the land in these two towns has been designated as "difficult" for evacuated residents to return to for a long time due to high levels of radiation contamination.