Ko Sasaki for The New York Times  In Iitate, Japan, a village 20 miles from the Fukushima nuclear plant, workers cleaned a school in a decontamination effort. More Photos »  IITATE, Japan — As 500 workers in hazmat suits and respirator masks fanned out to decontaminate this village 20 miles from the ravaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactors, their confusion was apparent.  “Dig five centimeters or 10 centimeters deep here?” a site supervisor asked his colleagues, pointing to a patch of radioactive topsoil to be removed. He then gestured across the village square toward the community center. “Isn’t that going to be demolished? Shall we decontaminate it or not?”  A day laborer wiping down windows at an abandoned school nearby shrugged at the work crew’s haphazard approach. “We are all amateurs,” he said. “Nobody really knows how to clean up radiation.”  Nobody may really know how. But that has not deterred the Japanese government from starting to hand out an initial $13 billion in contracts meant to rehabilitate the more than 8,000-square-mile region most exposed to radioactive fallout — an area nearly as big as New Jersey. The main goal is to enable the return of many of the 80,000 or more displaced people nearest the site of last March’s nuclear disaster, including the 6,500 villagers of Iitate.  It is far from clear, though, that the unproved cleanup methods will be effective.  Even more disturbing to critics of the decontamination program is the fact that the government awarded the first contracts to three giant construction companies — corporations that have no more expertise in radiation cleanup than anyone else does, but that profited hugely from Japan’s previous embrace of nuclear power.  It was these same three companies that helped build 45 of Japan’s 54 nuclear plants — including the reactor buildings and other plants at Fukushima Daiichi that could not withstand the tsunami that caused a catastrophic failure — according to data from Citizens’ Nuclear Information Center, a watchdog group.  One of them, the Taisei Corporation, leads the consortium that sent out the workers now tramping around Iitate in hazmat suits. Consortiums led by Taisei and the other two big companies — Obayashi and Kajima — among them received contracts for the government’s first 12 pilot decontamination projects, totaling about $93 million.  “It’s a scam,” said Kiyoshi Sakurai, a critic of the nuclear industry and a former researcher at a forerunner to the Japan Atomic Energy Agency, which is overseeing this phase of decontamination. “Decontamination is becoming big business.”  The cleanup contracts, Mr. Sakurai and other critics contend, are emblematic of the too-cozy ties they say have long existed between the nuclear industry and government.  “The Japanese nuclear industry is run so that the more you fail, the more money you receive,” Mr. Sakurai said.  The Japan Atomic Energy Agency said the construction giants would not necessarily receive the bulk of the future work, which will be contracted out by the Environment Ministry. Company officials, however, have indicated they expected to continue serving as primary contractors.  “We are building expertise as we work,” said Fumiyasu Hirai, a Taisei spokesman. “It is a process of trial and error, but we are well-equipped for the job.”  Kajima and Obayashi said they could not comment on the projects under way.  An Environment Ministry official, Katsumasa Seimaru, said that big construction companies were best equipped to gather the necessary manpower, oversee large-scale projects like decontaminating highways and mountains, and properly protect and monitor radiation exposure among the cleanup workers.  “Whether you promoted nuclear or not beforehand isn’t as important as what you can do to help with the cleanup,” Mr. Seimaru said.  Other construction companies are scrambling to get in on the action. In late January, the Maeda Corporation, another general contractor, won a cleanup contract, this one awarded by the Environment Ministry. Maeda bid to take the job for less than half the expected costs, an apparent loss-leader maneuver to get a foot in the door that has drawn complaints from other bidders, including Taisei.
Some of the companies that built Japanâs nuclear plants are now cashing in on the cleanup, though their knowledge of decontamination is a work in progress.