Voices of Fukushima’s Evacuees
About 88,000 people have been evacuated from around the Fukushima nuclear plant. Nine months after the tsunami, many are still unemployed and live in temporary housing.
Published: December 6, 2011
Conditions at Fukushima Plant Improve, but Return Home Will Take Years
In the United States, the average person gets six millisieverts of radiation a year. Around the Fukushima plant, officials evacuated areas where people would have gotten an estimated 20 millisieverts in the year after the accident. One area about twice the size of Manhattan was predicted to have a level of 100 millisieverts in the first year. The most contaminated parts of this area will be uninhabitable for at least three decades, experts say, though steps like removing soil could shorten that time.
Unit 3
Unit 1
400
350
300
250
200
150
100¡ C
50
DEC.
APRIL
Unit 2
helped prevent radiation from spreading further west to Aizu Region, a study found.
The mountains
Reactor temperatures have fallen. Tepco, the plant’s operator, expects to reach “cold shutdown” by year’s end. But decommissioning the plant could take 30 years.
Inside the Plant
HAMA-DORI
REGION
NAKA-DORI
REGION
AIZU REGION
Aizu Wakamatsu
126,000
Koriyama
339,000
Nihonmatsu
Iwaki
342,000
Okuma
Fukushima
293,000
Tsushima
Iitate
Lake
Inawashiro
Fukushima
Daiichi
NEW
JERSEY
STATEN
ISLAND
MANHATTAN
NEW
YORK
Approximate dimensions of the evacuation zone.
Area comparison
400 or more
100
1
20
Evacuation zone
Millisieverts per year
Densely populated areas
(Pre-tsunami population counts
shown for major cities)
Tepco/Reuters
Most evacuees now live in temporary housing and rented apartments. There are about 40,000 of these units in Fukushima Prefecture. Nearly half of the people who lived in the most affected towns were 50 or older.
Displaced
In a survey of residents of Okuma, about 56 percent of the displaced people who had full-time jobs before the disaster were able to maintain full-time employment.
Employment
About 88,000 residents lived in the evacuation zone. By comparison, the area evacuated after the Chernobyl accident was nearly four times larger, and some 300,000 people were displaced in the years after that accident.
Evacuation Zone
Reactor 1
Radiation Exposure
Reactor Temperatures
Tepco finished covering Reactor 1 with polyester panels in October, and has installed a cooling system.
According to Tepco, temperatures in the reactors have fallen below 100 degrees Celsius, one step toward a stable state known as “cold shutdown.”
OCT. 14
MAY 22
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Compare satellite images of areas of Japan before and after the disaster.