Tokyo, April 15: A conservative Japanese politician has called on Prime Minister Naoto Kan to resign over his poor management of the crisis that hit the country’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.
“The time has come for (the prime minister) to decide whether he stays or goes,” Kyodo news agency quoted Sadakazu Tanigaki as saying at a press conference in Tokyo on Thursday.
The remarks made by Tanigaki, who is the head of Japan’s main opposition bloc Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), reflects that political truce in post-disaster Japan has started to unravel.
Kan, whose public support stands at about 30 percent, has asked the opposition to join hands to help Japan recover from the nuclear crisis.
Kan on Thursday asked a panel of advisors to come up with creative plans to rebuild areas devastated by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami.
The 14-member panel includes the governors of the three hardest-hit prefectures — Iwate, Miyagi and Fukushima — and is led by Japan’s National Defense Academy President Makoto Iokibe and his deputy, Takashi Mikuriya.
The operator of Japan’s tsunami-flooded Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), is struggling to pull damaged spent fuel rods out of a storage pool at one of the reactors.
The struggle to remove highly toxic water at the crisis-hit nuclear power plant continued on Thursday, with the level of polluted water in the plant’s underground trench found to be edging up again.
The removal of some 60,000 tons of highly radioactive water from the basements of Numbers 1 to 3 reactor turbine buildings as well as trenches connected to them is essential in order to restore key cooling functions of the reactors.
TEPCO pumped out about 660 tons of contaminated water on Tuesday and Wednesday from one of the trenches to a condenser inside the nearby Number 2 reactor turbine building.
According to the National Police Agency, the number of those killed or missing from the quake and tsunami now stands at over 28,000.
——–Agencies