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The town of Minami-Soma in Fukushima Prefecture had its no-entry designation lifted on Sunday for the first time since residents were evacuated after last year's nuclear accident at the nearby Daiichi power plant.
Minami-Soma is the first coastal town to have the designation lifted.
The government is letting up to 16,000 people back into the area, but they won't be allowed to stay overnight.
A 20-kilometer zone around the plant has been off-limits to about 100,000 residents for more than a year because of radiation contamination. But the plant was declared stable in December, with leaks substantially subsiding, and that let officials focus on how to clean up the contamination and allow some people to return.
The no-entry designation was lifted after the government rearranged the evacuation zone around the stricken nuclear plant based on three categories of contamination, rather than by distance. The strict perimeter was long criticized as an inexact measure of safety, as radiation levels varied widely in the area and some hotspots existed outside the area.
The change affects three of the 11 municipalities inside the former evacuation zone.
Parts of Minami-Soma still lie within contaminated zones but the town allowed residents to visit their homes in the least contaminated areas. Residents will be allowed to return permanently following further decontamination efforts, but there is no timetable on that yet.
Under the revised evacuation plans, areas with annual exposure levels estimated at 20 millisieverts or below are deemed safe for people to visit and prepare for their permanent return, while being encouraged to make further decontamination efforts. Limited access is allowed for residents in areas with higher contamination -- up to 50 millisieverts of estimated annual exposure. Places with annual exposure estimates exceeding that will remain off-limits.
© Japan Today/AP
17 Comments
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YuriOtani
I would move back to my home. Let the police arrest me for living in my home. The radiation is small enough to make no difference for me. It is an alleged increase in cancer rates in 20 years.
NambyPamby
Oh let me tell you Yuri, isnt you for which we worry. Its every time you leave town, dragging isotopes around! If you want to hear no fuss, dont bring poison back to us! So go right back to your home, just promise to never roam!
kurisupisu
A few minutes to go in and out to grab a few belongings-sad!
borscht
A few minutes to grab a few radiated belongings and bring them back out to share with the rest of us. Kizuna indeed.
But, best of luck to those who can return. I hope they get their lives back together.
Dennis Bauer
thing inside the house doesn't have to be radiated, anywayz they could use a geiger teller to check
SquidBert
Do you not already live in your home Yuri? I bet you do, and I bet it is far away from the Fukushima plants.
Okinawamike
I would move back to my home. Let the police arrest me for living in my home. The radiation is small enough to make no difference for me. It is an alleged increase in cancer rates in 20 years.
And would you be taking your children with you?
YuriOtani
Oh true I do not have a house there and my old house is a parking lot. Second Yuri error has been detected. I sort of made a mistake in the decimal. 702 millirems my exposure is not 70 millisieverts but 7. Still would not change my mind. Really the "experts" are just guessing.
Fadamor
Anything they bring out is not going to contaminate another area. Sheesh! Some people are treating this like a virus epidemic! The irradiated stuff isn't going to create a ton of NEW irradiated stuff.
TSRnow
Attacking someone on JT is one thing, but please don't ask or say the same to the people of Fukushima who is suffering already.
smithinjapan
"The town of Minami-Soma in Fukushima Prefecture had its no-entry designation lifted on Sunday for the first time since residents were evacuated after last year’s nuclear accident at the nearby Daiichi power plant."
'Accident', eh? As in unintentional. Well, that's nice. I'm glad the residents are allowed to go back home under the ever-changing government guidelines about things they never know or knew about the earthquake accident, the tsunami accident, and subsequent other accidents.
yeah, I'm pretty picky when it comes to wording, but 'nuclear accident' is not something that you'll find in my vocabulary given what actually happened.
NambyPamby
It was not an attack.
Of course people and objects can be decontaminated, and of course people should be. But just letting people go back into a contaminated area and bring out a bunch of stuff, or worse, live there again after these power hosings and earth scrappings being wishfully dubbed decontamination, is something that will affect people outside the contaminated zone.
Even worse will be when those farmers start farming again.
The Russians take a lot of flak, but you don't see them being so stupid as to reopen areas around Chernobyl. Minami Soma is known for being covered in highly radioactive black dust. A power housing here and there and not wearing shoes in the house is not much reassurance that all that dust is gone.
Ben Jack
The government should have bought out their houses and land and they should have been relocated to places with a future.
YuriOtani
NambyPamby, different sorts of reactors and it is located in the Ukraine and not Russia. Second it took a 9 point earthquake and tsunami to cause the meltdown at Fukushima. The power plant in the Ukraine went all on its own. There are some really nice pictures of the atomic pile on fire.
The sad part is Japan, America and all the other countries are already contaminated by the industrial process. There is cancer causing stuff everywhere. Tokyo is probably one of the worse places on Earth. My first died of colon cancer with metastatic lung cancer. The doctors pulled a large cancerous thing from mine. Both of us lived downwind from one of the worse incinerators on Earth. People are watching the wrong mouse hole, like a magician the powers to blame atomic power while hiding an even worse danger.
If we remember one thing from Fukushima it is the radiation levels. An atomic war will be far worse. The cold war never ended, it is one of the lies. So look at what happened and picture a series of ground burst on the Korean peninsula. It is not about the weapons but the situation that made their creation.
NambyPamby
Incinerators being yet another bad idea here in Japan does not make Minami Soma safe.
TSRnow
If that is not an attack, I don't know what is.
I was assuming for your sake that it was an attack on one person and not the whole, but if you say otherwise, I think it is a very sad and cruel thing to say. Were you just satisfied, writing your little poem? People are aware of the risk by now, but at the time they were evacuated they didn't know what was happening so they left everything behind. Their homes, their work, their life. Can you imagine that?
BTW, Chernobyl has its boarders too, and as I saw on a news report, people have been farming and breeding cows just outside the area. They faced the same discrimination people of Fukushima are facing now, as if everything about them are contaminated.