Japan on Thursday opened its new nuclear emergency response center with facilities for real-time monitoring of the functioning of its nuclear plants and radiation levels around them.
Working under the country's Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA), the facility is designed to be an improvement on the old response center run by the authority's predecessor - the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency - whose crisis response during the Fukushima nuclear accident was severely criticized.
The 700-square-meter center in central Tokyo, three times more than the size of the old one, can accommodate 200 personnel. The center is also equipped with a video conference facilities, Japanese media reported.
The center is linked to emergency command centers at nuclear plants as well as the Prime Minister's office and municipal government offices.
During the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, the former regulator had failed to ascertain the accurate condition of the plants and could not communicate well with the Prime Minister's office.
Shuichi Kaneko, chief of disaster prevention at NRA, said the government's emergency response center during the Fukushima accident was overcrowded and overwhelmed by the enormous task facing it. Any efforts to share information were chaotic, he said and added that the new system incorporates many of the lessons learned from that accident, and would be able to respond to a future accident much more smoothly.
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