Fukushima evacuees can return to Tamura City in April

11 March 2014



Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe has announced that the evacuation order for Tamura City in Fukushima prefecture will be lifted on 1 April so that residents displaced as a result of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station accident can return home.

Over 3000 residents were evacuated from the eastern edge of the city on 12 March 2011, one day after the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami.

Abe, who was speaking on the eve of the third anniversary of disaster, said that the Japanese government would aim to lift the evacuation directive and move forward on decontamination and on restoring infrastructure, not only in the city of Tamura but also in other municipalities.

World Nuclear Association director general Agneta Rising welcomed the announcement. "Many of those places evacuated near Fukushima are now within normal levels of background radiation for most of the world; these are levels that people live with and we don't see any health impact. It is safe for people to return and we hope to see many more return soon," she said.

All six units at the Fukushima Daiichi site have been permanently shut down and are now undergoing decommissioning; a process that is expected to last 30 to 40 years. TEPCO is considering using undamaged units 5&6 as 'full-sized mock-ups' to test remote technologies that could be used for inspection and clean-up of the damaged reactors (units 1-4) on site.

In November, TEPCO begun work to remove used fuel from the unit 4 spent fuel pool and transfer it into another storage pond. As of 10 March, 462 out of 1533 fuel assemblies had been transferred. According to the decommissioning plan, all nuclear fuel debris is to be removed from the site by 2020, at the earliest.



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