Thousands rally for Fukushima compensation, decontamination
National Oct. 31, 2011 - 09:45AM JST ( 21 )
Thousands of people attend an anti-nuclear rally in Fukushima City on Sunday.
Thousands of people angered by Japan’s nuclear power plant accident rallied in Fukushima on Sunday to demand full compensation for victims of the crisis, and swift decontamination of their neighborhoods.
The rally in Fukushima city, some 60 kilometers from the plant, was attended by around 10,000 people, its organizers estimated.
“Our town should be decontaminated at the earliest possible date and our life should be restored as it was before March 11,” Tamotsu Baba, mayor of Namie town, told the rally, according to Jiji Press.
A 9.0-magnitude earthquake and monster tsunami on March 11 crippled the plant’s cooling systems and sparked reactor meltdowns, a series of explosions and the release of huge amounts of radiation into the environment.
All the 21,000 residents in Namie, just north of the Fukushima Daiichi plant, were forced to evacuate from their homes and remained sheltered in the prefecture and elsewhere in the country.
More than seven months after the disaster, tens of thousands of people remain evacuated from homes and businesses in a 20-kilometer no-go zone around the plant and in pockets beyond.
Fully decontaminating those areas is expected to take decades.
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