Kyodo
More than 100 evacuees from the town of Futaba, Fukushima Prefecture, situated about 3 km from the crisis-hit Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, paid their first temporary visits to their vacated homes Friday.
The 132 people from 73 households, including some who lived outside the 3-km exclusion zone, were to be followed later in the day by 35 evacuees from 23 families who lived in the neighboring town of Okuma. They were scheduled to visit a nursing care facility inside the zone.
The evacuees boarded minibuses Friday morning at a transit point outside the 20-km evacuation zone and were driven to their homes in the town.
The government plans to consider lifting the evacuation order for residents within 20 km of the power plant from around January, the deadline for "Phase 2" of the road map for crisis resolution worked out by the government and Tokyo Electric Power Co., officials said.
But the government will not lift the order for residents in areas where radiation levels are still very high, they added.
The government's most recent survey showed that the radiation level reached a maximum 84.7 microsieverts per hour in Okuma and 40.1 microsieverts per hour in Futaba, against the annual exposure limit of 1 millisievert for ordinary people.
The government gave permission for the evacuees to visit their homes and the welfare facility for a short time only, noting that the amount of radiation evacuees might be exposed to during their five-hour stay will be less than 1 millisievert.
The government has since May organized temporary home visits for many evacuees from the 20-km zone circling the plant, where nuclear meltdowns occurred in the wake of the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, to allow them to retrieve personal belongings. But it did not permit visits for evacuees from areas inside the 3-km zone until this month.