Twenty killometre ban around nuke plant:
Japan declares no-go zone
JAPAN: Japan Thursday banned people from going within 20
kilometres (12 miles) of the tsunami-hit Fukushima nuclear plant, which
has been leaking radiation.
The ban, which gives legal weight to an existing voluntary exclusion
zone, comes after police found more than 60 families living in the area
and residents returning to their abandoned homes to collect belongings.
Prime Minister Naoto Kan announced the no-entry area, due to be
enforced from midnight on a visit to Fukushima prefecture, where
thousands now live in evacuation shelters, almost six weeks after the
March 11 quake and tsunami.
The nuclear plant, where reactor cooling systems were knocked out,
has been hit by a series of explosions and leaked radiation into the
air, ground and sea in the world’s worst nuclear disaster since
Chernobyl 25 years ago.
More than 85,000 people have moved to shelters from areas around the
plant, including from a wider 30-kilometre zone, where people were first
told to stay indoors and later urged to leave, according to data from
the prefecture.
“The plant has not been stable,” Kan’s right-hand man, top government
spokesman Yukio Edano, said at a Tokyo news conference.
“We have been asking residents not to enter the area as there is a
huge risk to their safety.”
The ban can be enforced with detentions or 100,000 yen ($1,200)
fines.
One member of each household within the 20-kilometre no-entry area
will be allowed to make a two-hour return visit to their home to pick up
personal belongings, wearing protective suits and dosimeters. The trips
on buses will start within days and run for one or two months, but
exclude areas within three kilometres of the crippled Fukushima Daiichi
plant, where the radiation risk is deemed too high, Edano said.
“They are advised to keep the belongings they take out to a minimum,”
said Edano, the chief cabinet secretary, adding that all visitors to the
no-go area would be screened afterwards for radiation exposure. Tokyo,
Thursday, AFP |