Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan said on Saturday it will take decades to clean up and decommission the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant after the world's worst atomic accident since Chernobyl. Kan's comments marked the first time that Japan's government has offered a timeframe for the clean-up at Fukushima beyond the emergency measures now underway to shut down its reactors.
"It will take three, five, ten years, or eventually several decades to take care of the accident," Kan told local officials from his Democratic Party of Japan meeting in Tokyo. The Fukushima nuclear plant lost power after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami. Three of the reactors had uranium fuel meltdown, and a series of hydrogen explosions scattered radioactive debris across a wide area. Some 80,000 people have been forced to evacuate the area around the plant because of the threat from radiation.
With the four-month anniversary of the accident approaching, Japanese officials are due to detail progress in bringing Fukushima under control in the coming days. Kan, who has pledged a blank-slate review of Japan's energy policy, has been under fire for his handling of the nuclear accident and the government's response to the earthquake and tsunami.
Kan has said he will resign but has not specified when he will step aside, saying he sees it as his responsibility to see through initial recovery work and related legislation. In a move that raised concern about power shortages stretching into 2012, officials said this week that now-idled reactors would be subject to a safety "stress test" before they would be cleared to restart.
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