channel 9 and through 26 public address towers set up inside the city limits," said Fumiyoshi Kato, an official in the municipal nuclear power safety section.
The evacuation areas are mostly elementary schools and public halls. However, Kato said they do not contain much in the way of emergency supplies.
But one pressing issue is how to deal with residents who try to flee the area after an accident.
Antinuclear activists have long claimed that large steel gates on several roads leading into Tsuruga would be closed to keep people who might have been exposed to radiation from leaving.
Both Kato and Tatsuji Wada, an official in the city's disaster prevention section, deny the charge.
"Those gates were built in order to control traffic flow in the event of a heavy rainstorm or snowfall," Wada claimed.
However, the gates are not controlled by the city but by the prefecture, and Kato said it would be up to Fukui to decide if they should be lowered.
Local officials expressed confidence that a Monju disaster could be dealt with effectively.
Meanwhile, the road is clear for the reactor to be restarted. The Supreme Court handed down a decision in May upholding the government's decision to build the reactor, turning down a two-decade lawsuit by local residents who claim Monju has basic design flaws. However, questions remain about the plant's safety.
"What the Supreme Court didn't say was that Monju was safe to operate. The decision failed to address serious doubts about whether safety systems will actually work as designed," the Tokyo-based Citizens' Nuclear Information Center said in a statement following the court's decision.
There are also some fears that the material used at the reactor might be used for weapons production.
If Monju begins operating and burns either plutonium or, more likely, uranium-plutonium mixed oxide (MOX) fuel, which has plutonium as a byproduct, it raises the possibility that the plutonium could be stolen or diverted to make weapons.
Counterterrorism training at nuclear-power facilities involving police, nuclear-power officials and the affected municipalities will be held nationwide beginning next year.
But international concern is mounting over what operation of a nuclear fuel reprocessing plant in Rokkasho, Aomori Prefecture, might mean for controlling weapons-grade nuclear material. The plant is now scheduled to go into operation in 2007.
Japan finds itself under international pressure over Monju as well.
At a meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency meeting in September in Vienna, Alain Bugat, chairman of the French Atomic Energy Commission, proposed to Akira Shichijo, senior vice minister of the Cabinet Office, that France and Japan jointly use Monju once it begins operation.
Some segments of the nonproliferation community have welcomed the French proposal, saying it is a way for Japan to show the international community it is serious about strengthening its nonproliferation commitments.
Meanwhile, Japan's nuclear-power industry continues to see Monju as a cornerstone of the nation's energy policy.
"Monju's operation will restart Japan's fast-breeder program, which forms an important part of Japan's overall nuclear energy strategy for the 21st century," said Shunsuke Kondo, who heads the Atomic Energy Commission.
"With a fast-breeder reactor program, we can reduce dependency on fossil fuels and provide clean energy that is much cheaper than other forms, such as solar or wind."
The government in 1983 approved the construction of the Monju reactor by the government-affiliated Power Reactor and Nuclear Fuel Development Corp. Its successor, the Japan Atomic Energy Agency, created in October 2005 by integrating two government-backed nuclear-related institutions, has taken over the Monju project.
After two decades of unsuccessfully trying to get Monju up and running, and 10 years after the accident forced the plant to shut down, people opposed to Monju say that, beyond the safety and proliferation concerns, Japan's fast-breeder reactor program is nothing more than another failed government public works project.
Monju, which is supposed to be the first of many fast-breeder reactors, was built at a cost of 600 billion yen and will require billions more before it goes fully online.
"The fast breeder program is a white elephant. After 45 years in development, it doesn't light a single light bulb. We must end this program and move on to better things," said Aileen Mioko Smith, of the antinuclear group Green Action Japan.
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