Exclusion zone widened as another quake hits Japan

JAPAN has widened the evacuation zone around a stricken nuclear plant a month on from a huge natural disaster as another 7.1 magnitude quake and tsunami alert strained nerves anew.

The latest aftershock caused buildings to sway in the capital Tokyo, shortly after the nation had observed a minute’s silence to remember the 13,000 people killed in the March 11 disaster and the 15,000 officially still missing.

The US Geological Survey said the 7.1 onshore quake hit at 5:16pm (08.16 GMT) at a depth of just 13km. Its epicentre was 81km south of Fukushima city, near the troubled nuclear plant.

Japan’s meteorological agency issued and later cancelled a tsunami alert.

Another tremor of 7.1 last Thursday — just one of thousands of aftershocks to hit the country — killed at least two people and cut electricity across a huge area of northern Japan.

Workers battling to contain the crisis at the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear plant were evacuated after the latest quake, which briefly knocked out power to crippled reactors before electricity was restored.

People across the country had paused at 2:46pm, the moment Japan’s biggest ever recorded earthquake struck, setting off a chain of events that has left workers scrambling to tame runaway atomic reactors at Fukushima.

It was the worst tragedy to envelop the country since World War II.

Prime Minister Naoto Kan promised he would “never abandon” tsunami survivors as he tried to focus attention on the future.

Kan, on only his second trip to the disaster zone since the tragedy, said the government would “work as fast as possible” to house the more than 150,000 people still living in emergency shelters.

Underlining the threat of long-term health damage from radiation, the government said it was to widen the evacuation area around the atomic plant to include some towns outside the current 20km exclusion zone.

Those areas were liable to receive potentially hazardous radiation levels of 20 millisieverts per year, government spokesman Yukio Edano said, while stressing there was no deterioration at the plant.

Engineers at Fukushima who last week sealed a leak spewing highly contaminated water into the sea, have begun installing a “silt curtain” to try to prevent radioactive mud from spreading around the ocean.

But at the same time, plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co (Tepco) is deliberately dumping more than 10,000 tonnes of mildly radioactive water into the ocean to free up urgently needed storage space for highly toxic liquid.

On Sunday one worker was taken to hospital after complaining of feeling sick, the operator said.

Masataka Shimizu, the president of Tepco, yesterday visited Fukushima and apologised for the atomic emergency engulfing the area. “I offer my personal apology from the bottom of my heart once again to the people in Fukushima prefecture and residents near the nuclear plant for having imposed such awful physical and mental burdens.”