Japan says no plan to expand nuclear evacuation zone
Tokyo – The Japanese government said Thursday that it had no immediate plans to expand a 20-kilometre evacuation zone around a damaged nuclear power station that is leaking radiation despite a recommendation to do so by the global nuclear watchdog.
Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said Tokyo would instead reinforce radiation monitoring of soil.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) suggested overnight that the country consider evacuating Iitate village, about 40 kilometres from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, after the agency found amounts of radioactive iodine in the soil there that exceeded its health limits.
The village is not only outside the evacuation zone around the plant, which was crippled by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, but it is also beyond the 30-kilometre zone in which people have been advised to stay indoors.
In the soil contamination in Iitate, IAEA experts found radioactivity from iodine-131 at 25 megabecquerel per square metre of soil, more than double the agency’s evacuation threshold of 10 megabecquerel, an unnamed IAEA source said.
‘The first assessment indicates that one of the IAEA operational criteria for evacuation is exceeded,’ senior IAEA official Denis Flory told reporters.
It was the highest level measured among nine communities located 25 to 60 kilometres away from the reactors, which are located 250 kilometres north-east of Tokyo.
‘They should really think about evacuating,’ the source said of the village of 7,000 people.
