Today the Japanese government reported that higher than expected levels of radioactive contamination may keep areas around the Fukushima nuclear plant off-limits for human habitation for years, or even decades.
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The 90,000 residents who live within a 12.4 mile (20 km) radius of the stricken plant—nearly all of whom have been homeless for more than five months—are likely to be a lot sorrier. Government data shows that some areas within the evacuation zone are contaminated with the radiation equivalent of more than 500 millisieverts a year—25 times higher than Tokyo's safety limit for annual exposure. Even if TEPCO can completely halt the leakage of radiation from the plant, those levels mean that thousands of homes may remain too contaminated to live in for years or decades, as the case has been with the exclusion zone that now surrounds the Chernobyl plant in Ukraine.
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