Victims face long wait for compensation – With negotiations still months off, TEPCO urged to make provisional payments

A government panel has set a guideline on eligibility for basic compensation as a victim of the nuclear crisis at the Fukushima No. 1 power plant, but negotiations on actual payment amounts are not expected to begin for several months at least.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said Thursday it is “necessary for [plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co.] to promptly pay provisional damages” to meet the financial needs of residents who have been forced to flee areas near the plant.

It will also be important that negotiations with people who suffered losses or expenses do not drag on, Edano said.

Under the guidelines laid out by the panel Thursday, compensation will be paid for losses caused by restrictions and voluntary controls on shipments of farm and fishery products in the wake of accidents at the plant, and evacuation costs borne by local residents.

Entitled to damages for evacuation costs are about 83,000 people ordered by the government to evacuate or stay indoors after the outbreak of the crisis, and about 10,000 residents in areas that are now subject to one-month evacuation deadlines.

Payment amounts are set at 1 million yen for households with more than one member, and 750,000 yen for single-member households.

The panel plans to compile in July an interim guideline defining the entire range of grounds for compensation, which will become the basis for full-scale negotiations between TEPCO and victims.

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Lengthy negotiations ahead

According to the Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Ministry, negotiations between TEPCO and individual victims are not expected to begin before October, when the utility estimates it will have stabilized the temperature of the damaged reactors at less than 100 C.

The start of the talks might even be delayed until January, according to the ministry.

TEPCO will regard compensation agreements with individual victims as finalized when the victims sign documents promising not to pursue any further damages claims, said an official at the ministry’s office for nuclear compensation.

To get people to sign such contracts, TEPCO must ensure the crisis at the Fukushima plant does not worsen.

Following a criticality accident at JCO Co.’s uranium-processing facility in Tokaimura, Ibaraki Prefecture, in September 1999, compensation agreements were finalized with 6,000 people, or about 92 percent of those eligible, within six months.

But the troubles at the Fukushima plant are far bigger in scale than the JCO case, and a far wider area is affected, with the number of victims estimated at in excess of 100,000.

The whereabouts of many people affected by the crisis have still not been confirmed by the local governments concerned.

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Where to draw the line?

The panel’s initial guidelines do not include concrete procedures for compensation negotiations. A formula for calculating amounts of damages will be included in future additions to the guidelines.

In cases where residents were forced to evacuate under instruction of the central government, the panel is developing a formula to determine compensation for costs such as transportation and accommodation.

The formula would be universally applied, meaning people who have taken shelter in school gymnasiums and other public facilities will be entitled to the same amount of compensation as those who have stayed in hotels.

The formula will likely consider the number of days evacuees have been away from their homes.

Mental distress was not deemed grounds for compensation in the JCO accident, and it remains uncertain who will qualify for compensation on that front in the Fukushima case.

Panel Chairman Yoshihisa Nomi, a professor at Gakushuin University, said: “The line should be drawn between those who were irradiated and those who were not exposed.”

For individual farmers, estimates of income lost due to the nuclear crisis are expected to be calculated based on objective data, such as sales in previous years and crop acreage, and used as the basis for negotiations between agricultural cooperatives and TEPCO.

But many farmers have no records to prove the magnitude of financial damage suffered.

The guidelines released do not cover compensation for losses caused to the farming industry by rumors about radiation contamination.

According to JA Group Tochigi, which on Thursday asked TEPCO to pay 1.2 billion yen to cover losses suffered in March, shipment restrictions resulted in direct losses of 269 million yen, and unfounded speculation about radiation caused losses totaling a whopping 932 million yen.

The total amount of damages paid will depend greatly on how damage caused by rumors is assessed.

Mitsuhiko Totsuka and Tetsushi Onoda, Yomiuri Shimbun Staff Writers