5.1 magnitude quake hits Japan 80km from Fukushima nuclear plant
31 Dec 2013 A shallow 5.1-magnitude earthquake has hit eastern Japan, the US Geological Survey says, but there are no local reports of any damage. The quake hit at 10.03am (1203 AEDT) in Ibaraki prefecture, 146 kilometres northeast of Tokyo, the agency said. The tremor was 9.9 kilometres deep, USGS said. Located roughly 80 kilometres southwest of the Fukushima nuclear plant, the quake was strong enough to gently rock high-rise buildings in the capital.
Japan’s homeless recruited for Fukushima radiation clean-up
29 Dec 2013 Seiji Sasa hits the train station in this northern Japanese city before dawn most mornings to prowl for homeless men. The men in Sendai Station are potential laborers that Sasa can dispatch to contractors in Japan’s nuclear disaster zone for a bounty of $100 a head. This is how Japan finds people willing to accept minimum wage for one of the most undesirable jobs in the industrialized world: working on the *35 billion, taxpayer-funded effort to clean up radioactive fallout across an area of northern Japan larger than Hong Kong.