Japan bans entry into Fukushima evacuation zone

Japan has made it illegal to enter a 20km (12-mile) evacuation zone around the stricken Fukushima nuclear reactor.

People were urged to leave the area shortly after the 11 March earthquake and tsunami crippled the plant, but the order was not enforced by law.

Cooling systems were knocked out by the twin disasters and radiation has been leaking from the plant.

Brief re-entry will be allowed to the area's 80,000 former residents to collect belongings.

It is not clear how many people are living in the evacuation zone, but reports said police had counted at least 60 families.

After the disaster the government also declared a wider 10km zone around the 20km evacuation area where people should either stay indoors or leave.

It later recommended that people also evacuate that area as well.

"The plant has not been stable," said chief government spokesman Yukio Edano.

"We have been asking residents not to enter the area as there is a huge risk to their safety," he said. "Unfortunately, there are still some people in the areas."

"Today... we have decided to designate the area an emergency area based on disaster law."

Long wait

Most of the evacuees are living in sports hall and gymnasiums waiting to return home.

It could be a long wait, says the BBC's Roland Buerk in Tokyo, as the plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co (Tepco), has said it aims to bring the reactors to a cold shutdown within nine months.

The evacuation zone will be reassessed then, adds our correspondent.

Residents would be allowed supervised visits of two hours to collect belongings, which would be screened for radiation contamination.

Workers at the Fukushima Daiichi plant are attempting to remove highly radioactive water from a reactor building to allow repair work to the cooling systems knocked out on 11 March.

Emergency workers have been unable to enter any of the damaged reactor buildings at the plant since then.

Nearly 14,000 people have been confirmed to have died in the earthquake and tsunami and more than 13,000 people are missing.

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Eerie Hush Descends on Japan's Nuclear Zone

FUTABA, Japan—In the Coin Laundry, a dryer is still loaded with clothes: an orange hooded sweatshirt, a green worker's vest and two pairs of jeans, damp and smelling of mildew.

At Joe's Man restaurant near the train station, a menu lists the lunch specials, starting with bacon-and-eggplant pasta in a tomato-cream sauce. A flyer on the open doors of the Nishio clothes shop promotes a five-day "inventory clearance" sale. Over the road that runs through the town center, a white-and-blue sign proclaims: "Understanding Nuclear Power Correctly Will Lead to an Abundant Life."

But life, by and large, is what is absent in this town, just a few miles away from the troubled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.

Futaba, once home to 7,000 residents, is one of eight towns forced to evacuate the day after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami damaged the nuclear plant. In the following days, tens of thousands of residents living within 12 miles of the damaged reactors fled. Last Monday, the Japanese government expanded the mandatory evacuation zone to encompass more towns.

On Sunday, the nuclear complex's operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co., said it aims to get the crippled plant under control with a so-called cold shutdown that brings down pressure and temperatures inside the reactors in six to nine months. Japan Trade Minister Banri Kaieda said some of the evacuees may be able to return after that but acknowledged it wouldn't be possible for all of them to come back then.

Futaba Mayor Katsutaka Idogawa, meanwhile, said it will be "years" before the residents of his town can return. The utility on Friday said it would begin initial compensation payments of up to ¥1 million, or about $12,000, to residents from an 18-mile zone around the plant—an offer some evacuees called an insufficient, short-term sop.

Police have established road blocks on Route 6, the main surface road running north and south through the zone. Authorities have declared evacuation mandatory for the area up to 12 miles from the plant and advised people who are six miles beyond that to stay inside. Police cars, ambulances or fire trucks occasionally patrol the towns inside the mandatory zone. While it isn't illegal to enter the area, it's strongly discouraged.

"What are you doing here?" a fireman asked a reporter walking in the street. From the passenger seat, another firefighter held up a radiation monitor. "You are not supposed to be here. It's dangerous," he said. "Please leave soon."

Some locals are evading the road blocks, traveling into the area by narrow side streets to gather possessions—confronting the possibility of never returning to live in Futaba.

On Thursday, a woman who identified herself as Ms. Takasaki rushed in and out of a beautiful, traditional Japanese home. She said her family is living with relatives in Fukushima City, about 60 miles inland. She had traveled to Futaba with her husband, daughter and father-in-law to pack as many of their possessions as they could in 30 minutes.

She wore a clear rain poncho, a face mask and sunglasses. Her shoes were covered with clear plastic bags, taped around her ankles.

"We're in a big hurry," she said as she carried boxes of clothes to the open trunk of a sedan, handing a stranger an armful of winter coats to carry to the car. "But since this is probably the last time we'll come back here, there are things we needed to get."

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Japanese Declare Crisis at Level of Chernobyl

TOKYO—The Japanese government raised its assessment of the monthlong crisis at its Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant to the highest severity level by international standards—a rating only conferred so far upon the Chernobyl accident.

Japan's nuclear regulators said the plant has likely released so much radiation into the environment that it must boost the accident's severity rating on the International Nuclear Event scale to a 7 from 5 currently. That is the same level reached by the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in the former Soviet Union, which struck almost exactly 25 years ago, on April 26, 1986.

"Based on the cumulative data we've gathered, we can finally give an estimate of total radioactive materials emitted,'' Hidehiko Nishiyama, spokesman for Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, said at a press conference Tuesday.

Even as they upgraded their assessment of the situation, Japanese officials went to lengths to say that the problem they are struggling to contain isn't anywhere near the disaster of Chernobyl.

"It is quite different from Chernobyl," said Mr. Nishiyama. "First, the amount of released radiation is about a tenth of Chernobyl," he said, adding that while there were 29 deaths resulting from short-term exposure to high doses of radiation at Chernobyl, there were no such deaths at Fukushima.

"At Chernobyl, the nuclear reactor itself exploded," he said, adding that at the Fukushima plant, the pressure vessel and the containment vessel were largely intact.

Still, Fukushima Daiichi operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. warned Tuesday that since the Fukushima Daiichi plant is still releasing radioactive materials, the total level of radiation released could eventually exceed that of Chernobyl, a spokesman said.

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Japan Nuclear Plant Plugs Highly Radioactive Leak

Workers at Japan's tsunami-damaged nuclear power plant on Wednesday finally halted a leak that was sending a tide of radioactive water into the Pacific and exacerbating concerns over the safety of seafood, the operator said.

It was a rare bit of good news for the Fukushima Dai-ichi complex and the coastal areas surrounding it, where high levels of seawater contamination have angered fishermen and prompted the government to set limits for the first time on the amount of radiation permitted in fish.

But in a sign that workers still face several challenges before the overheating reactors are stabilized, Tokyo Electric Power Co. said it plans to inject nitrogen gas into one of the reactors. Nitrogen can prevent highly combustible hydrogen from exploding — as it did three times at the compound in the early days of the crisis.

There is no immediate possibility of an explosion, but the "nitrogen injection is being considered as a cautionary measure," said spokesman Hidehiko Nishiyama of Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency.

TEPCO said the process could begin as early as Wednesday evening in Unit 1 — where pressure and temperatures are the highest — according to spokesman Junichi Matsumoto. The same measures will eventually be taken at the other two troubled reactors.

The 9.0-magnitude earthquake and tsunami that followed are believed to have killed as many as 25,000 people. Hundreds of miles (kilometers) of coastline have been destroyed and the country's fishing industry devastated.

Since the crush of water flooded the plant and knocked out cooling systems, workers there have been desperately trying to cool overheated reactors. The effort has required spraying large amounts of water and allowing it to gush out wherever it can escape, sometimes into the sea.

While officials have said the crack in a maintenance pit plugged early Wednesday was the only one found, they have not explicitly ruled out that radioactive water is leaking into the sea from another point.


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