UN nuclear chief to view contaminated Fukushima soil

The UN nuclear watchdog chief will make his first visit this week to storage facilities for vast quantities of soil contaminated in the 2011 Fukushima disaster.

Japan's government must decide what to do with the soil – enough to fill 10 baseball stadiums – scraped from the wider Fukushima region as part of efforts to remove harmful radiation.

That is on top of the monster task of decommissioning the Fukushima Daiichi plant, which went into meltdown after being hit by a tsunami in the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl.

Rafael Grossi, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), will tour the plant on Wednesday. He will also be shown some of the 13 million cubic meters of soil and 300,000 cubic meters of ash from incinerated organic material.

For comparison, the capacity of the Tokyo Dome arena, where pop superstar Taylor Swift performed last year, is 1.24 million cubic meters.

Japan plans to recycle roughly 75 percent of the removed soil – the portion found to have low radioactivity levels.

If this material is confirmed safe, authorities want to use it for building road and railway embankments among other projects.

The remaining soil will be disposed of outside the Fukushima region ahead of a 2045 deadline.

The central government has said it intends to confirm the disposal site this year, with Fukushima's regional governor reportedly urging it to come up with a plan quickly.

In September, the IAEA published its final report on the recycling and disposal of the soil, saying that Japan's approach was consistent with UN safety standards.