Tokyo, April 04: The Japanese government is examining a plan to relocate people from the disaster-hit northeast as the struggle to control the nuclear crisis continues.
Government sources said on Sunday the initiative includes buying urban areas that would be hard to reconstruct as well as encouraging people from coastal regions to move to higher places, DPA reported.
An official at the land ministry has said the land will be bought at the price they were worth before the quake and the tsunami hit the country.
However, the residents are likely to show resistance to the resettlement plan. Having predicted people’s disagreement, the government is also working on a plan to develop urban residential regions that can resist a tsunami and thus allow people to continue to live near the sea.
Japanese companies may also decide to relocate their production in Thailand as they see equal costs of resuming their production both in Japan and Thailand with lower risks of natural disasters in the latter, Thai officials said.
Meanwhile, efforts are underway to stop leakage of radioactive substances to seawater from reactor number 2 at Fukushima nuclear plant. Some food products from towns around the epicenter of the nuclear crisis have already been contaminated.
Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said on Saturday the level of radiation in the seawater near Fukushima plant has reached more than 4,000 times the legal limit.
The National Police Agency has said 11,938 people have died from the earthquake and tsunami and 15,478 are still missing.
——–Agencies