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Going Back: Radiation and Intentions to Return amongst Households Evacuated after the Great Tohoku Earthquake

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Abstract

Based on a survey conducted with evacuees from the Fukushima radiation-affected region of Japan we examine intentions to return, eventually to the family homes. Many respondents do not intend to return, particularly those from tsunami-affected towns, but higher income households and those who evacuated to the same town are more likely to go back. Intentions are only weakly responsive to changes in ambient radiation levels and families with children are particularly unwilling to return to radiation affected areas, suggesting that the ongoing policy of active decontamination may have only a limited impact on eventual resettlement.

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Notes

  1. Reuters, 28 Nov 2016, ‘Fukushima nuclear decommission, compensation costs to almost double: media’, www.reuters.com/article/us-tepco-outlook-idUSKBN13N03G . About 40% of these costs are compensation payments which would not normally be counted as costs in a benefit cost exercise. However, some part of the payments may be compensation for actual damages incurred.

  2. Although not directly affected by the flooding, the tsunami cut off access to the nearest high school and other local government and commercial facilities. Hence we cannot say that the rate of return is simply due to perceived risk from radiation.

  3. The omitted prefecture is Iwate which also suffered large-scale tsunami damage. Lying to the north of Miyagi prefecture measured radiation levels were only marginally affected by the Fukushima accident.

  4. Note also that the figures for death-rates are closely related to other measures of damage such as the number of houses destroyed or damaged.

  5. Although, Maderthaner et al. 1978 also find a positive relationship between distance to a nuclear reactor and risk perception and speculate that familiarity through proximity eliminates some element of fear. Venables et al. 2012 in a study of risk perception from nuclear power in the UK find a similar effect and cite a lengthy list of previous studies that also find a positive relationship between distance from industrial facilities and concern.

  6. In theory we could use the same approach with the concern variable, but the instrument fails a weak instrument test ((Kleibergen-Paap rk Wald F statistic =0.056).

  7. A well-known problem of linear probability models is that the predicted value of the dependent variables can, in theory, lie outside the interval [0,1] which would be incompatible with interpreting it as a probability. We check our estimates and find that only two out of 520 predicted values have a negative value (both −0.075) and none exceed 1.0.

  8. In results that we do not include in the table, we also consider interaction terms between the concern variable and age, number of children and number of elderly, but there are no significant effects and the pattern of marginal effects for radiation level are not altered.

  9. From Fukushima prefecture. http://www.pref.fukushima.lg.jp/sec/16025d/kako-monitoring.html . Site accessed June 2015.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Shinya Horie for survey preparation. This research was funded by the Grant-in-Aid for Specially Promoted Research [26000001B]; the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, and S16 of the Ministry of the Environment, Japan. The results and conclusions of this article do not necessarily represent the views of the funding agencies.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies, Tokyo, Japan

    Alistair Munro

  2. Urban Institute & Department of Urban and Environmental Engineering, School of Engineering, Kyushu University, Fukuoka, Japan

    Shunsuke Managi

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  1. Alistair Munro
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  2. Shunsuke Managi
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Correspondence to Alistair Munro.

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Munro, A., Managi, S. Going Back: Radiation and Intentions to Return amongst Households Evacuated after the Great Tohoku Earthquake. EconDisCliCha 1, 77–93 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41885-017-0001-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41885-017-0001-6

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