TOKYO
A nuclear watchdog has estimated it would take 16 hours for the around 180,000 people living within 30 kilometers of an idled nuclear complex on the Japanese coast to evacuate - almost five hours longer than that calculated by the local government.
Kyodo news agency reported sources close to the matter as saying Thursday that Fukui prefectural government's figure covered only 90 percent of residents in Fukui and Kyoto prefectures living within 30 km of the Takahama nuclear complex in western Japan.
The report by the Nuclear Regulation Authority said that the local authorities also did not take into account the time required to conduct radioactive contamination checks in the area in the event of a severe accident.
It concluded that the authority's estimates of evacuation times suggested local governments have underestimated the difficulties of evacuation during a nuclear disaster.
On Tuesday, a Japanese court banned the restart of two idled reactors at Takahama following a petition by a group of nine residents.
The judge cited clear and "imminent danger" to local residents if the reactors were to be fired up.
The residents had filed the injunction due to safety concerns regarding any future risk from earthquakes.
Judge Hideaki Higuchi ruled that the plant remained ill prepared to handle a major earthquake and tsunami, such as those which left the Daiichi Fukushima plant in meltdown in 2011.
Japan has since shut down all its nuclear plants, which has forced the country to depend on imports for most of its energy needs.
Kyodo reported that the Nuclear Regulation Authority had also calculated evacuation times for other nuclear power plants in Fukui Prefecture.
It said that the longest evacuation time would be 26 hours 20 minutes for a worst-case scenario involving a disaster at the Mihama plant, almost double what the prefectural government had claimed.
