A roadside shop is boarded up on the edge of the exclusion zone around the stricken Fukushima Nuclear Power plant near Namie. Some areas inside the exclusion zone and around may remain deserted forever.
Four years after the Tohoku earthquake and a deadly tsunami that precipitated the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear disaster, hundreds of square miles around the stricken reactor remain off-limits for habitation due to radioactivity. As part of the cleanup operation thousands of tonnes of topsoil have been removed and bagged up but currently there is a lack of suitable storage facilities for the radioactive material.