Sacks filled with radiation-contaminated debris are lifted onto a truck in the center of Tomioka. Over 5.5 million bags of radioactive debris have now been accumulated, however a 10-ton truck can only carry seven bags giving a sense of how long the clean up operation will take.
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.