By Richard Engel, NBC News Chief Foreign Correspondent
7 March 2012 It’s what an insurance company might call “a write-off” – a place that seems beyond salvation, and certainly too expensive to fix. I’d never thought of land that way. You smash up a car, and then it’s compacted into a square and maybe even recycled. Finito. But land? Last year, Japan’s disaster at the Fukushima nuclear power plant contaminated the land around it so badly that the area was effectively a write-off.  It’s been excised from terra cognita, uninhabitable, unwanted. Today the radiation-infected area is known by a name Ray Bradbury would like: “the exclusion zone.” With radiation detectors clipped to our white hazmat suits, we drove into this decimated pocket of our planet. Before we could get inside, a policeman stopped our car. There are checkpoints all around the exclusion zone, which extends in a twelve-mile radius around the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant. The people who lived in the zone left in a hurry. They had no time to pack up their homes and businesses. Only recently, and with special permission, the Japanese government has allowed former residents to return to collect family heirlooms, important documents or equipment. The former residents are only permitted to stay for a few hours. It’s a grab-and-go operation. […] I walked down the center of the street. It’s an odd feeling to walk down the middle of a main street, down the dotted line. I walked into a large drug store. The door was open. It was an American-style drugstore that sold everything from candy bars to razors to toilet paper. The shelves were still stocked. There were half-filled baskets in the aisles. It was silent. No people. No cash registers. No background music. Nothing. A sushi restaurant was next door. It was locked. The menu on the front window showed the lunch special, a combo of sushi and miso soup, that was offered on the day of the explosion. I walked into a man’s home. I opened his fridge. It was full. The food was rotten. There was a laundromat nearby. There were carts half full of clothing in front of the washing machines. But suddenly we heard movement. Cows, which have broken out of their enclosures, have taken over the town. They seemed more wild and aggressive than usual. The cows were led by bulls. We had to hide behind a tree as the bulls raced past, cows charging behind them. They ran so quickly I saw a cow slip on the street and crash into storefront. She scampered to her feet and joined the feral herd.

One year after disaster at Fukushima nuclear plant, town remains frozen in time