The government should consider evacuating children and pregnant women from a wider area around the Fukushima No. 1 power plant because radiation levels remain high even outside the 20-km no-go zone, Kumi Naidoo, executive director of Greenpeace International, said Thursday in Tokyo.
Naidoo’s team of radiology experts found hot spots that had a maximum hourly reading of 45 microsieverts of radiation alongside a school zone. <...>
Jan Beranek, an expert on radiology from Greenpeace International who joined Naidoo’s trip to Fukushima, recommended that the government widen the evacuation zone to at least 60 or 70 km from the power plant.
He said there were parks and public spaces where the level of radiation activity hit 9 microsieverts per hour.
Even some nursery schools that have already undergone a decontamination process had a relatively high reading of 0.5 microsievert per hour, he said. That would translate into an annual exposure of 5 millisieverts, which was the evacuation threshold for Chernobyl, Beranek said. <...>
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