By Yoko Kubota | Reuters | Sept. 30, 2011
TOKYO, Sept 28 (Reuters) - Japan faces the prospect of removing and disposing of 29 million cubic metres of soil contaminated by the world's worst nuclear crisis in 25 years from an area nearly the size of Tokyo, the environment ministry said in the first official estimate of the scope and size of the cleanup.
Six months after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami triggered reactor meltdowns, explosions and radiation leaks at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant on Japan's northeast coast, the size of the task of cleaning up is only now becoming clear.
Contaminated zones where radiation levels need to be brought down could top 2,400 square km (930 square miles), sprawling over Fukushima and four nearby prefectures, the ministry said in a report released on Tuesday.
Tokyo Metropolitan prefecture has a total area of 2,170 square kilometers (840 square miles).
The environment ministry has requested an additional 450 billion yen in the budget for the fiscal year from next April, Kyodo news agency reported.
The government has so far raised 220 billion yen ($2.9 billion) to be used for decontamination work, but some experts say the cleanup bill cost reach trillions of yen .
If a 5 cm (2-inch) layer of surface soil, likely to contain cesium, is scraped off affected areas, grass and fallen leaves are removed from forests, and dirt and leaves are removed from gutters, it would amount to nearly 29 million cubic metres of radioactive waste, the document showed.
This would be is enough to fill 23 baseball stadiums with a capacity of 55,000 spectators, and the government must decide where to temporarily store such waste and how to dispose of it permanently.
Japan has banned people from entering within a 20 km (12 mile) radius of the plant, located about 240 km (150 miles) northeast of Tokyo and owned by Tokyo Electric Power Co . Some 80,000 people were forced to evacuate.
The government aims to halve radiation over two years in places contaminated by the crisis, relying on both the natural drop in radiation as time passes and by human efforts.
The ministry's estimate assumes that cleanup efforts should be mainly in areas where people could be exposed to radiation of 5 millisieverts (mSv) or more annually, excluding exposure from natural sources.
The unit sievert quantifies the amount of radiation absorbed by human tissues and a mSv is one-thousandth of a sievert. Radiation exposure from natural sources in a year is about 2.4 mSv on average, the U.N. atomic watchdog said. ($1 = 76.655 Japanese yen) (Editing by Ed Lane)