10:24 AM
The detection of excessive radiation in a village 25 miles northwest of the damaged Fukushima nuclear facility is raising questions about whether Japan's recommended evacuation zone is adequate and whether standards for evacuations will be adequate in any U.S. accident.
At a hearing Thursday on Capitol Hill, Rep. Nita Lowey, D-N.Y., asked Nuclear Regulatory CommissionChairman Gregory Jaczko whether his agency's plan to evacuate people within 10 miles of a U.S. nuclear plant accident was adequate.
Jaczko said NRC's emergency preparedness is "built on two thresholds." One is a "preplanned" evacuation of those living within 10 miles of a plant. The second threshold is 50 miles from a plant. Within that zone, he said, the plan would be to ensure that contaminated food supplies could be dealt with.
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But, he added, "in any situation it is up to state and local governments ... to take the appropriate protective action that could extend beyond" the 10-mile evacuation zone.
The International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nation's nuclear watchdog, found one of its criteria for evacuation had been exceeded in a "relatively small area" in the Japanese village of Iitate, which is twice as far from the Fukushima plant as outer limits of the 12-mile evacuation zone recommended by Japanese authorities.
More cautious than the Japanese authorities, the NRC advised Americans within 50 miles of the plant to leave after it was damaged by a quake and tsunami.
Lake Barrett, a Rockville, Md., nuclear consultant and former NRC engineer, called 50 miles "too much."
"This is a very severe accident in Japan. It's not a health catastrophe," Barrett said. "Say you were Japanese in this zone (12 to 50 miles from the Fukushima plant) and you see your American neighbor packing up his children in the car. (You might think) maybe your government's not telling you the truth."
Barrett said he lived within 10 miles of Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island nuclear facility for four years to help with cleanup after a partial meltdown there in 1979. "I saw what the evacuation did to people," he said. "The psychological harm did far more damage than the health risks."
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But NRC spokesman Eliot Brenner defended his agency's recommendation of a wider evacuation from around the Fukushima plant.
"In an accident of this magnitude, the situation is still very much in flux," Brenner said. "Were this to have happened on this scale in the United States, that (50-mile evacuation) is what we'd be looking at."
Edwin Lyman, a senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a group based in Washington, D.C., questioned whether the NRC has planned adequately for wider evacuations around U.S. nuclear facilities.
"There's absolutely no evidence that the authorities would be able to expand evacuation zones in the United States spontaneously," Lyman told reporters Thursday.
Meanwhile, officials with Tokyo Electric Power Co. said Thursday that radioactive contamination in groundwater nearly 50 feet underneath a Fukushima reactor had been measured at 10,000 times the government health standard. A spokesman said the company didn't think any of the drinking water supply had been affected.
And Japan's health ministry on Thursday said it ordered more tests after a cow slaughtered for beef more than 40 miles from the Fukushima nuclear plant was found to have radioactive contamination slightly higher than the legal limit. The cow's total cesium level was only about 2% above that limit.
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