Mr Kan told the Japanese Communist Party leader Kazuo Shii that the whole of the crippled Fukushima Daiichi power station should be decommissioned. -- PHOTO: REUTERS
SENDAI - JAPAN said on Thursday its crisis-hit nuclear plant must be scrapped, but currently had no plans to evacuate more people, despite calls for a larger exclusion zone around the crippled facility.
Grappling with the aftermath of a massive earthquake and tsunami, its biggest post-war disaster, Japan's government hosted French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who called for clear international standards on nuclear safety.
Japan's Prime Minister Naoto Kan said, in talks with the Japanese Communist Party leader, that the facility at the centre of the worst atomic accident since Chernobyl in 1986 must be decommissioned, Kyodo News reported.
Officials have previously hinted the plant would be retired once the situation there is stabilised, given the severe damage it has sustained including likely partial meltdowns and a series of hydrogen blasts.
Radioactive iodine-131 in groundwater 15m beneath the plant has reached a level 10,000 times the government safety standard, the plant's operator Tokyo Electric Power Co (Tepco) said early on Friday.
It cautioned the figure - showing radioactive runoff from efforts to cool the plant has entered the water table - might be revised. Tepco said on Thursday iodine-131 in nearby seawater had hit a new high 4,385 times the legal level.
However, there were no plans to widen a 20km exclusion zone around the Fukushima plant despite the UN atomic watchdog saying radiation at Iitate village 40km away had reached evacuation levels. -- AFP
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