Ghost Towns of Fukushima Remain Empty After Decade-Long Rebuild
March 11th, 2021Via: Bloomberg:
Laid waste by a nuclear disaster a decade ago, Japan’s Fukushima is still struggling to recover, even as the government tries to bring people and jobs back to former ghost towns by pouring in billions of dollars to decontaminate and rebuild.
But reconstruction efforts from the mundane — supermarkets and transport infrastructure — to a cutting-edge hydrogen energy plant have yet to entice more than a small fraction of the former population to return.
As the country marks the 10th anniversary of the March 11, 2011 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown, parts of Fukushima are still off limits and the prefecture remains a laggard in recovery. Its future is clouded by the 30 to 40 years it may take to decommission the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, near which millions of gallons of treated radioactive water are in storage.
