Japan plagued by primitive cleanup efforts after Fukushima disaster

New York Times : Although the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster occurred more than a year and a half ago, cleanup of the contaminated environment has been slowly and shoddily executed, reports Hiroko Tabuchi for the New York Times. Rather than take advantage of local and international expertise in decontamination methods, Japan’s government has turned much of the effort over to the country’s largest construction companies, which have little radiological cleanup expertise. And to save money, the companies have been using primitive, potentially hazardous techniques. At one elementary school about 12 miles from the Fukushima nuclear plant, “construction workers blast buildings with water, cut grass and shovel dirt and foliage into big black plastic bagsâmdash;which, with nowhere to go, dot [the] landscape like funeral mounds,” writes Tabuchi.