Picnics were once held in the no-go zone at the nuclear power plant

TOMIOKA, Japan (AP) – Part of the city of Tomioka, about 10 kilometers (6 miles) from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, is still a no-go zone 10 years after a meltdown caused radioactive fallout over the area.

The no-go zone is about 12% of the city, but was home to about a third of Tomioka’s 16,000 residents. It remains closed after the rest of the city in northeastern Japan reopened in 2017.

Only those with official permission from the city office are allowed to enter the area for a day visit.

Part of the area called Yonomori used to be a commercial center with shops, homes, a 7-Eleven supermarket and the popular regional supermarket chain York Benimaru.

The area also includes Yonomori Park, surrounded by cherry tree streets, where townspeople gathered for ‘hanami’ parties, picnics under the blossoms, and walked through a tunnel of flowering trees.

This part of the no-go zone has been designated a dedicated recovery site and officials plan to reopen it in 2023. The other half of the zone is a nuclear waste dump, an area filled with black bags of radioactive soil, cut tree branches and other contaminated debris collected from all over the city. The bags will eventually be sent to an interim waste storage facility in Futaba and Okuma, the two cities where the nuclear power plant is located.