Nuke plant owner to pay Rs 2,650 crore

Japanese government orders TEPCO to offer payouts to thousands made homeless by ongoing crisis

Nuke plant owner to pay Rs 2,650 crore

Japanese government orders TEPCO to offer payouts to thousands made homeless by ongoing crisis

The Tokyo Electric Power Company will start handing out checks "as smoothly and as early as possible," hopefully by April 28, said its president, Masataku Shimizu.

Officials sift through the debris and try to find the pieces of their lives.u00a0Japanese Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko visit demolished houses in their first trip to an area in Chiba prefecture yesterday

Individual residents will receive 7,50,000 yen (Rs 4 lakh) and households will get 1 million (Rs 5.35 lakh), Shimizu said, with the company's interim cost estimated at about $600 million (Rs 2,650 crore).

A government committee ordered the payments as an advance on the compensation that Tokyo Electric will owe nearby residents and businesses for the month-old crisis at Fukushima Daiichi, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said.

Edano said the government hopes to have payments in residents' hands by Japan's 'Golden Week,' a string of national holidays that begins in April 29.

About 78,000 people living within 20 km of the plant were ordered out of their homes in the days after the accident, which now is ranked at the top of the international scale for nuclear disasters.

Those living another 10 km out were told to remain indoors as the plant belched radioactive particles into the environment. Tokyo Electric has no timetable for resolving the accident, and the yet-unknown cost of
compensation has called the survival of Japan's largest utility into question.

Plant workers have been battling to cool the overheated cores of reactors 1-3 at Fukushima Daiichi.
The plant was swamped by the tsunami that followed March 11's historic earthquake, knocking out normal coolant systems.

At the plant yesterday, efforts continued to drain highly radiaoctive water from the basements and service tunnels of the reactor units'turbine plants a necessary first step to restoring normal cooling systems.

Tragic end

Meanwhile, a 102-year-old Japanese man killed himself yesterday because he was being forced to leave his home in a newly-declared danger zone around the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant.

The man was the oldest resident of Litate 24 miles from the plant and considered safe until the no-go zone was expanded this week and his family was ordered to evacuate. He was "depressed at the idea that he would have to leave his place," the report said.

The news came as about 300 police officers made their first sweep of the six-mile zone closest to the plant.

Disneyland reopens
Five weeks after Japan's quake, tsunami and nuclear crisis struck, Tokyo Disneyland threw open its doors again yesterday.

The opening brought some welcome relief to thousands of disaster-weary families.

Mickey Mouse greeted and hugged many of the 10,000 visitors who had queued up, some of them all night, outside the giant theme park, which had been shut despite suffering only minor damage in the tectonic disaster of March 11.

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