The government of Japanese prime minister Kan is finally telling evacuees from within the 20 km exclusion zone around the wrecked Fukushima-I nuclear power plant that they won’t be able to return any time soon.

For months the official line had been that residents could not return until the reactors had achieved “cold shutdown”, which normally means that the chain reaction had stopped and the decay heat in the core had subsided enough for the coolant to be below 100 degrees C (below boiling point). This line ignores the fact that three of the reactors no longer have a cooling system in the usual sense and more importantly, that the area around the power station was severely contaminated by radioactive fallout from the broken reactors.

That reality has finally been accepted, explains the New York Times:

The government was apparently forced to alter its plans after the survey by the Ministry of Science and Education, released over the weekend, which showed even higher than expected radiation levels within the 12-mile evacuation zone around the plant. The most heavily contaminated spot was in the town of Okuma about two miles southwest of the plant, where someone living for a year would be exposed to 508.1 millisieverts of radiation — far above the level of 20 millisieverts per year that the government considers safe.

The survey found radiation above the safe level at three dozen spots up to 12 miles from the plant. That has called into question how many residents will actually be able to return to their homes even after the plant is stabilized.

Many of the evacuees had been led to believe that most of them might be able to return to their homes some time after the turn of the year, based on Tepco’s promises of establishing some sort of a cooling system and generally stabilizing the situation at the plant. Probably over 100,000 people will have to rebuild their lives from scratch elsewhere now, with no prospect of returning for decades, just like in the exclusion zone in Ukraine and Belarus near the Chernobyl plant, that has been off-limits for over a quarter of a century already. Besides a semicircle of 20 km radius around Fukushima-I there is also a strip of land to the North West, towards Fukushima City, that includes the village of Iitate mura, which is just as badly contaminated as the vicinity of the reactor itself.

People from the area should have been told much sooner, but presumably the prospect of having to pay compensation played a part in holding off giving people the facts. If somebody other than Kan was prime minister, they may well have waited for another 6 months. Kan will probably step down shortly and frankly I don’t hold much hope for how his successor, whoever he may be, will deal with the situation.

Kan famously took on ministerial bureaucracies and vested interests as health minister before and he tried his best in this situation. Many others would try to avoid confrontation with the nuclear industry, following the path of least resistance instead. Kan’s support ratings are extremely low now, but perhaps his efforts, however imperfect they were, may not be fully appreciated until we have his successors to compare with…

• Large Zone Near Japanese Reactors to Be Off Limits (NYT, 2011-08-21)