As the nuclear situation at the stricken facility in Fukushima, in Japan's northeast, rumbles on as the plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), continues to grapple with storing massive amounts of contaminated water in tanks at the plant, with space rapidly running out as new tanks quickly reach capacity, and prepares to activate an ice wall to prevent ground water entering the battered reactor buildings and vice versa, separate data from the government continued to paint a bleak picture of the situation in the crisis-hit region.
According to the latest estimates from the Environment Ministry, while the actual decommissioning of the faulty plant will still take decades, decontamination work involving the cleaning up of radioactive substances is still ongoing in one-third of municipalities that were affected by the disaster.
As reported by NHK, in Fukushima Prefecture, of 43 communities cited, only 14 have been properly decontaminated, while 50 of 58 municipalities in seven other prefectures have seen the vital cleaning up work finished or very nearly so.
Five years ago, an undersea megathrust earthquake jolted the very foundations of Japan, with the most powerful earthquake ever recorded here causing a devastating tsunami with waves as high as 40 meters killing almost 16,000 people.
According to the government's latest statistics, specifically those from the Reconstruction Agency, more than 3,400 of the survivors of the 2011 disasters have since died, due to health problems related to the catastrophes, with the most deaths being in Fukushima Prefecture, which accounted for 58 percent of the total at 1,979.
As of February 12, meanwhile, 174,471 people remain in temporary housing or are still living in relatives' homes, the agency reported, the former of which includes 156,234 people who are living in prefabricated housing or apartment complexes that are being rented out to the evacuees by the government.
The agency also said that 43,139 people originally from Fukushima are still living outside the prefecture, with officials there stating that Japan's broader population crisis is magnified in the nuclear-disaster-hit hub, with families with children reluctant to return, and the birthrate in the prefecture dropping demonstrably after the crisis.
In Fukushima, Miyagi and Iwate, 12 communities said their population has slumped more than 10 percent since the disaster, with more than half of those communities saying that numbers had plunged by more than 20 percent, according to the agency.
An NHK survey released recently also revealed that returning to Fukushima Prefecture for some evacuees is not an attractive proposition, not only for environmental and health reasons, but also for economic ones. The report, based on studies conducted between December and February, showed that almost half of those surveyed are hovering around the poverty line and finding it hard to afford life's basic necessities.
Forty two percent of those polled maintained that their living conditions had not changed substantially, but 37 percent said their situation has become markedly worse, with 11 percent stating that they are "struggling" economically.
Figures also showed that for 37 percent of the population their income had decreased, with 22 percent saying they have no income at all, with household spending pressures, like transportation, food and utilities, increasing in the embattled prefecture.
Separately, the Education Ministry said recently that not all public school buildings will be earthquake-proof by the end of this fiscal year, meaning that some 2,400 buildings could collapse if a major earthquake were to strike of an intensity of 6 or more on Japan's scale that peaks at 7.
Local governments have said that financial constraints have delayed the process of the nationwide construction upgrade to public school buildings.
