The events that led up to the Fukushima disaster of 2011 are well known but they bear restating. On 11 March that year, a 9.0 earthquake occurred just 70 kilometres (km) off the Japanese coastline, resulting in a tsunami hitting the country’s eastern seaboard. Waves measuring up to 15 metres flooded the four-decade old Fukushima nuclear facility. The plant shut down three of its six reactors, and it was estimated that 70 per cent of one and a third of another had melted, releasing radioactive isotopes into the atmosphere. Although a complete meltdown was avoided, it was still the most significant nuclear incident since Chernobyl in 1986. The Japanese government imposed a 20-km exclusion zone around the plant, which displaced over 150,000 people.

Once immediate danger of complete meltdown passed and the situation had been brought under control, attention turned to the cleanup. Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), which ran Fukushima, announced a ‘roadmap towards restoration’, around a month after the tsunami. Since then, it has been revised twice, in July 2012 and June 2013. Japan’s Atomic Energy Commission estimated that it would take up to 30 years to fully decommission all the reactors. Many observers have suggested that it will be even longer before the site can be deemed ‘safe’ once more.

Cleaning up after an incident like this was never going to be easy, but environmental campaigners both in Japan and worldwide have been concerned with what has happened since and the perceived mismanagement by the authorities in charge of the site. “There are many problems with the cleanup”, explains Kazue Suzuki, Nuclear Energy spokesperson for Greenpeace Japan. “The biggest one is that there is no place to put the contaminated soil [although trials are being held to determine the viability of storing it at Horonobe Underground Research Center]. If you go to Fukushima you will see plastic bags everywhere.”

Indeed, images have surfaced of bags lining roads near the plant. Suzuki confirms: “Very often the authorities have decontaminated somebody’s property and they have just put the removed top soil in a plastic bag and left it there. That practice is pretty common. Even childcare facilities and schools are having bags left in them. It’s been three years now, and many of these bags are beginning to deteriorate.”

Much of this, she explains, is down to political wrangling. “Some of these bags were supposed to go into interim storage... but this has fallen through because negotiations between the government and local government have broken down. These bags really should be stored in a safe place at a safe distance from residential property, and especially away from children’s facilities.”

Then there are problems with contaminated water. The authorities are using an ‘advanced liquid processing system’ (ALPS) for decontamination that filters out most of the radioactivity and then stores it in tanks. But the ALPS system broke down three times in 2013 – it was discovered that it was being corroded by the very radioactive water it was supposed to be decontaminating.

“As far as we can gather, TEPCO and the government are struggling to deal with this”, says Suzuki. “Apart from the breakdown with the ALPS system, they don’t seem to have found a solution to storing the highly contaminated water.” Indeed, work on an underground frozen wall around the damaged reactors to contain the water has been largely criticised, with many questioning its efficacy. And back in December, officials on the Japanese Industry Ministry’s contaminated water panel admitted it would run out of storage space in just two years. Neither TEPCO nor the government responded to Resource’s requests for more information about the current state of the cleanup.

Public relations don’t appear to be their strong point. Other worrying stories have leaked out – in December, Reuters reported that some of the tanks storing highly contaminated water were ‘leaky’. Last August, one of these tanks was said to have leaked over 300 tonnes of water, and radiation levels near another were said to have spiked after a further leak. Further, there have been allegations of poor working standards and a pressurised working environment where mistakes and shoddy workmanship are commonplace. Again, TEPCO did not respond to questions regarding these allegations.

Suzuki has deep doubts about the cleanup. “The government’s plan is not very comprehensive. For example, when they check a property for levels of contamination they maybe check two points – in front of the porch and the middle of the yard. If it’s an area of land then they will check just one square metre. It just doesn’t seem thorough enough.”

Other observers are not so critical. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) issued a report in February saying that Japan had ‘developed its efforts towards decommissioning the plant promptly after the accident’, and had since ‘achieved good progress in improving its strategy and the associated plans, as well as in allocating the necessary resources towards the safe decommissioning’. It also praised the government and TEPCO, saying that in the last year they’ve ‘adopted a more proactive attitude and approach’ towards addressing the many difficulties at the site.

However, the IAEA report also included 19 points where current practices could be improved, from overhauling the overall communication strategy, to finding ‘a sustainable solution to the problem of managing contaminated water’ (which, it admits, could include ‘the possible resumption of controlled discharges to the sea’).

There is also the issue of who pays. The Japanese government has taken control of the cleanup, which it estimates will cost in the region of 3,300 billion yen (£17.3 billion) – a figure that only looks set to rise. Of this, TEPCO has so far only contributed 375 million yen (£2.2 million) – a fraction of one per cent.

At present, the Japanese government is not giving a final date for the cleanup’s completion – the most it will say is that “it will take few more years to complete” (while the IAEA suggests it could be more than 40) – but it’s likely it will be decades before the thousands of people who were displaced will be able to return to the homes and lives they left behind.

There will be lessons to be learned, but what has happened already highlights the snag that has long thrown nuclear’s viability into question. “It’s obvious from what we’ve seen that you cannot deal with radioactive waste”, says Suzuki. “We cannot dispose of it. We can only store it – and that brings its own set of problems. The only solution is not to create it any more.”