IAEA says Japan should consider further evacuations

Japan should consider evacuating a village outside the exclusion zone around the Fukushima 1 nuclear power plant because of high radioactivity levels, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said Wednesday in Vienna, dpa reported.

The community concerned is Iitate, some 40 kilometres from the stricken power plant. It is beyond the 20-kilometre evacuation zone and the 30-kilometre zone in which people have been advised to stay indoors.

"The first assessment indicates that one of the IAEA operational criteria for evacuation is exceeded," senior IAEA official Denis Flory told reporters.

IAEA experts found radioactivity from iodine-131 at 25 megabecquerel per square metre of soil in the village, more than double the agency's evacuation threshold of 10 megabecquerel, another IAEA source told the German Press Agency dpa.

It was the highest level measured among nine communities some 25 to 60 kilometres away from the nuclear accident at the quake-stricken reactors.

"They should really think about evacuating," the source said.

Flory explained that local peaks in radioactivity can be caused by the interaction of wind, rain and the local terrain.

Therefore, the initial measurements in Iitate do not mean that the area around this community is also of concern or that the evacuation zone should be expanded as a whole, Flory said.

The IAEA has told Japan to carefully assess the situation, and authorities there told the agency that they had already started an evaluation process. The Vienna-based agency has only an advisory role on nuclear safety in its member states.

Earlier Wednesday, environmental group Greenpeace advised pregnant women and children to leave Iitate because of high radiation levels that the group's experts measured.

The IAEA bases its evacuation threshold levels on pregnant women and children, but the organization assumes that populations would leave as a whole.