"Government envisioned Tokyo evacuation in worst-case scenario"

As reported by the Asahi Shimbun, the administration of Prime Minister Kan ordered plans be drawn up for a worst-case scenario at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear catastrophe site. If one or more reactors had exploded, and released large amounts of hazardous radioactivity, the site would have had to have been abandoned, for the safety of the workers. In that case, the storage pool for high-level radioactive waste at Unit 4 would have boiled dry, and its contents caught fire.

The worst-case scenario plan, drawn up by Shunsuke Kondo, chairman of the Japan Atomic Energy Commission, would have called for the mandatory evacuation of a 170-kilometer (105-mile) radius, and the voluntary evacuation from the 170-km to 250-km zone (155-mi). This later radius would have included the Tokyo metropolitan area, itself home to more than 13 million people.