Fukushima Evacuees Worry They May Never Go Home

These evacuees are living at a stadium in Koriyama, a city some 44 miles from the quake-crippled nuclear plant in Japan. Many are worried that they will never be able to return home.

More than two weeks after a huge earthquake and tsunami triggered the world's worst nuclear crisis since 1986, prospects for a speedy resolution at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant look more distant by the day.

Concerned over radiation exposure, people who used to live near the plant came to the center to receive radiation check-ups. Among them: a young office worker, Reiko Satou.

Satou is among the tens of thousands of people who used to live near the Fukushima plant. She worked at an office a quarter mile from the plant and escaped to an evacuation center near Tokyo a few days after the crisis.

She came to Koriyama on Tuesday to look for her parents who were staying in a stadium along with 300 other evacuees.

[Reiko Satou, Evacuee from Fukushima]:
"My biggest concern is whether I would be able to go back home or not and, if I went back home, whether I would be able to return to my life. I am also worried about the stresses that my family and evacuees close to me are undergoing. People around me are concerned over the situation. We do not know when the situation will normalize, and we think there may never be a future for us in the city."

Plutonium has been found in the soil at the crippled plant 150 miles north of Tokyo, authorities said on Tuesday. It's the latest in a series of radioactive contamination revelations.

More than 70-thousand people have been evacuated from a 12-mile exclusion zone around the plant. Another 130-thousand, who live in a six-mile band beyond the exclusion zone, have been advised to either leave or stay indoors.

For now, a badminton court and other facilities in the Koriyama stadium have been transformed into living quarters for the evacuees. They are making do with provisions of water and food, and keeping warm in blankets laid out for them.