Nuclear disaster

On Monday record levels of radiation were recorded at the damaged Fukushima Daiichi plant. TEPCO reported that Geiger counters, hand devices used to measure radiation, registered the highest possible reading of over 10 sieverts (10,000 millisieverts) per hour at the bottom of a ventilation stack between two reactors.

Maximum exposure for workers at the Daiichi plant is limited to 250 millisieverts of radiation per year. The current leakage is undoubtedly fatal to humans. Kenji Sumita, expert in nuclear engineering at Osaka University, says, "radiation leakage at the plant may have been contained or slowed but it has not been sealed off completely."

A day after the reported leak, TEPCO said it found another area on the ventilation stack where radiation exceeded 10 sieverts per hour. Such levels could lead to incapacitation or death after just seconds of exposure.

'No excuse'

On Wednesday, around 300 farmers gathered and staged a noisy protest outside TEPCO's headquarters in Tokyo. The protesters shouted slogans like: ''Return our life, return a green Fukushima'' and ''No excuse. Show your sincerity and compensate us.'' Most of the protesters were cattle farmers who have lost their livelihoods since the detection of radioactive cesium in hay which had been fed to cows and ultimately lead to bans on beef shipments from four prefectures in Japan.

To make things worse, the Japanese government extended its beef cattle shipment on Tuesday to another prefecture, Tochigi, which is located around 100 kilometers north of Tokyo. "The decision was made after the authorities found four cows from Tochigi prefecture to be contaminated with radioactive cesium exceeding the official limit," Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said at a news conference.

Compensation

Meanwhile, the Japanese government is working on multi-billion-dollar compensation payouts for the victims of the ongoing disaster at the Daiichi nuclear power plant. On Wednesday, Japanese parliament passed a law to create a state-backed entity which will help Daiichi plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) pay out compensation. The bill creates a fund into which TEPCO and other atomic power companies will contribute.

TEPCO has said in a short statement that it will move forward with "fair and prompt compensation" under the law and "with help from the government." But almost five months since Japan's worst quake on record and a massive tsunami hit the Fukushima plant, the crisis is continuing and authorities have no way yet of assessing how many people will eventually deserve compensation.

Author: Marina Joarder (AFP, IPS, dpa, Reuters)
Editor: Sarah Berning