FUKUSHIMA — Tetsuo Sakuma has loaded his small pickup with all it can carry. There's not much of value: a television, some books, boxes of clothes, snatched in haste from a home he may never sleep in again.

"We hope to come back, but it's difficult to tell when," he says.

As he talks, he glances toward a hulking suite of concrete buildings nestling behind trees about 2 km away. The Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant has driven him out of the house in the town of Okuma where he has lived all his life.