Green Column: Hydropower’s Resurgence and the Controversy Around It

AUSTIN, TEXAS — Hydropower, a renewable energy source often overshadowed by excitement about wind and solar power, is enjoying something of a global resurgence.

Huge, controversial dam projects have recently made headlines in Brazil, Chile and Laos. Many developing countries, hungry for energy to supply their growing economies over the long term, are determined to keep building more modest-sized dams too.

Record amounts of hydropower capacity came online in 2008 and 2009, the most recent years for which data are available, according to Richard Taylor, executive director of the International Hydropower Association in London.

“There has been, over the last decade, a dramatic increase in the deployment of new hydropower capacity,” Mr. Taylor said.

The private sector, he added, has become more willing to provide financing for projects, which include not only the construction of new dams but also the modernizing of existing ones in places like Europe and the United States. The biggest new dams can cost billions of dollars.

But the renewed attention to hydropower, which accounts for about 16 percent of the global electricity mix, comes with environmental red flags. More attention than ever focuses on people who face displacement, as well as the effects of new dams on land and fish.

In Chile last week, demonstrators protested against a government plan to dam two rivers that wind through a wild, remote part of Patagonia. Last month, officials from Southeast Asian countries failed to reach an agreement about a proposed dam project on the Mekong River in Laos, amid concerns from Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand about downstream implications.

An additional environmental issue — one that has caused mounting concern in recent years — is climate change. Changes in rain or snowfall patterns can drastically affect the amount of power a dam produces and also the amount of sediment flowing through the river.

Prolonged droughts are already taking their toll. Brazil, which gets about 80 percent of its electricity from hydropower, experienced a bad drought about a decade ago, and Chile has struggled with drought, too, according to Deborah Lynn Bleviss, a professor in the energy, resources and environment program at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies in Washington.

A 2009 drought took a toll on countries including Guatemala, Venezuela, Argentina and Uruguay, as well as Brazil, she said.

“All have had impacts on hydropower capacity in these countries,” Ms. Bleviss said in an e-mail.

The region around Three Gorges Dam in China, the largest hydropower project in the world, is coping with a severe drought that has closed part of the Yangtze River to shipping, according to the state-run China Daily newspaper.

Small hydropower projects are especially vulnerable to climate change, according to Leandro Alves, who heads the energy division for the Inter-American Development Bank’s infrastructure and environment department, because they may not have enough reservoir storage capacity to compensate for decreased precipitation.

However, some dams may get more water, not less, as the climate changes. In a summary report on renewable energy released last week, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said that the effect of climate change would vary depending on a project’s location.

“For hydropower the overall impacts on the global potential is expected to be slightly positive,” the report states.

“However, results also indicate the possibility of substantial variations across regions and even within countries.”

In Norway, which gets nearly all of its electricity from dams, climate change on balance may benefit hydropower plants. “The studies have uncertain results, but the main result is that climate change on average will lead to more rain and thereby better production capability in Norwegian power plants,” said Tor Arnt Johnsen, who heads the analysis section of the Norwegian Water Resources and Energy Directorate, which is part of the Ministry for Oil and Energy, in an e-mail.

However, he noted, climate change is expected to lead to substantial weather variations. Thus, in especially dry and cold years, the dams are likely to produce less electricity, which could result in high electricity prices and the need to import power.

 

The Saturday Profile: An Iranian Filmmaker Tiptoes Around the Censors to Explore Risky Subjects

But he is determined, seeing the publication of hundreds of these photographic relics from the late 19th and early 20th centuries as a way to reconstruct a part of Iran’s visual history, filling a vacuum left by a government that lives in constant denial of its pre-revolutionary past.

“There should be a whole office doing this, and I don’t even have an assistant,” he said. “But I believe in it.”

For Mr. Oskouei (pronounced os-koo-WEE), picture postcards are as much a part of the cultural healing process as the documentaries for which he was a recipient of a 2010 Prince Claus Award of 25,000 euros (about $37,000) from the Dutch Foreign Ministry. His films have broached delicate issues like female suicide in traditional communities, juvenile drug addiction and Iran’s crisis of youth identity, themes that could easily land an Iranian in jail.

He is best known outside Iran for his 2006 film, “Nose, Iranian Style,” about the prevalence of nose jobs in Iran, a world leader, per capita, with 60,000 to 70,000 operations a year. That reflects in part the fierce competition among young women for marriageable men after the 1980s war with Iraq, in which 400,000 Iranian men died. But the film’s real target, Mr. Oskouei says, is the consumerism and nihilism of contemporary Iran, compared with the years after the 1979 revolution, when people were prepared to die for their ideals.

In his 2004 film, “The Other Side of Burqa,” Mr. Oskouei’s camera captures the hurried night burial of a young bride who hanged herself from a ceiling fan in a fishing village on the Persian Gulf island of Qeshm, an all-too-common occurrence in a traditionalist society where young women can feel trapped.

His knack, experts say, is to capture these deeply personal scenes almost as if neither he nor his cameras were in the room. “He gets what he wants without any disturbance in the process,” said Ahmad Alasti, a professor of film studies at the University of Tehran.

Mr. Oskouei even penetrates the pagan exorcism ritual of zaar, a dance that originated in East Africa but is practiced in the coastal regions and islands of southern Iran. It is a wildly expressive dance performed to the driving rhythms of drums and the chants of men, and provides a rare outlet for women to unleash their passions in a restrictive society. Many of the women in the film speak frankly of their struggles with patriarchy and economic hardship, which severely limit their development as individuals.

But perhaps his most remarkable accomplishment is to handle these subjects mostly without running afoul of the clerics, the censors or other artists, some of whom have accused him of being too accommodating.

“In the Western world it is enough just to be an artist, but not here,” said Ali Dehbashi, the editor of a cultural magazine, Bukhara. “Knowing the censors, knowing how things are monitored, is the most important thing.”

“Art is not having one film banned and running to Los Angeles or Paris,” Mr. Dehbashi added. “The point is to stay, to work and to continue.”

When asked about his ability to take on apparently taboo topics without retribution, Mr. Oskouei said in measured tones, “We live in a very particular social and political situation.” His own extensive footage of supporters of both President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the top opposition candidate, Mir Hussein Moussavi, during the 2009 election campaign remains unedited — perhaps for historians to examine in a later age.

“Should I make a film that means I get thrown out of this society?” he asked. “I don’t want that. Should I make a film and use it to seek asylum in another country? I don’t want that at all. In the end, people have to be flexible. I think about how far I can go.”

Many of the giants of Iranian cinema, like Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf, as well as the Kurdish director Bahman Ghobadi, have avoided the issue by shifting their base of operations abroad. But for Mr. Oskouei, that would risk what a close friend, Nasser Fakouhi, described in an article as a “slow death,” far away from all the “little rascals and desperate women” who populate his films.

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Unrest Around the Arab World Endangers Turkey’s Newfound Influence

 

In a few short years, Turkey has emerged as the Middle East’s most dynamic power. But weeks of Turkish diplomacy in Libya collapsed Monday, and Turkey’s prime minister bluntly called for Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi to step down. A similar situation may await in Syria, where President Bashar al-Assad has personally promised Turkish leaders to undertake reform while persisting with his crackdown.

In neighboring Iraq, Turkey fears the inability of the government there to keep the country stable as the United States completes its military withdrawal. And Lebanon, where Turkey enjoys access to both Hezbollah and its foes, is now entering a fourth month without a government.

Before the so-called Arab Spring unleashed by revolution in Egypt and Tunisia, Turkey was a catalyst in an emerging realignment of the Middle East, charting a foreign policy often independent of the United States in a region bereft of any country that matched its political stature. Now the unrest on its borders is undermining years of diplomatic and economic investment, forcing Turkey to take a more assertive role as its vision of economic integration runs up against the threat of growing instability.

“In the face of this unpredictable change around the Arab world, Turkish foreign policy is facing a major setback,” said Sami Kohen, a columnist for Milliyet, a daily newspaper in Turkey. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan “has started losing the leaderships in the Arab world that he trusted and considered important, one after the other.”

Syria, beset by a six-week uprising, may prove his greatest challenge, as it broadly echoes the experience of its Arab neighbors over the past four months. In Tunisia, Egypt and now Libya and Yemen, governments have resisted surrendering some power to stay in office, only to eventually face the prospect of losing all power. Syria’s leader, too, is rebuffing calls for change.

“Outside actors possess little leverage,” the International Crisis Group said Tuesday in a statement on Syria. “Even countries that have developed close ties to Damascus, such as Turkey, are viewed with growing suspicion by officials who are increasingly paranoid and consider anything short of outright support an act of betrayal.”

In past weeks, Turkish diplomacy has been especially intense with Syria, which it considers its most immediate concern as a linchpin in its regional strategy of greater economic integration. Mr. Assad and Mr. Erdogan have spoken on the phone at least three times, and the Turkish intelligence chief, an official with deep knowledge of Syrian affairs, has visited Damascus twice since the uprising began in March. Their message, officials say, was that time was running out for reform.

In language that echoed Mr. Erdogan’s statement to Colonel Qaddafi, he warned Syria’s government against a repetition of Hama, where the Syrian military crushed an Islamist revolt in 1982, killing at least 10,000 people and perhaps far more.

“Turkey needs Syria more than it needs the Syrian regime,” said a Damascus-based analyst who requested anonymity, given the delicacy of the subject.

From Iraq to North Africa, Turkey’s growing profile in the Arab world has emerged as one of the region’s most remarkable dynamics. Trade with Iraq was about $6 billion in 2010, almost double what it was in 2008. There, and in Syria, visa restrictions were removed, facilitating trade across booming border regions that helped reconnect cities like Aleppo, Syria, to their historic hinterlands. About 25,000 Turkish workers flocked to Libya for sprawling construction jobs. Turkish pop culture is everywhere: the star of one action series, “Valley of the Wolves,” is so famous that he lends his name to Iraqi cafes.

Since January, Turkey has sought to protect those gains, while negotiating the tumult in the region. Though Turkey’s ties with Egypt lacked the depth of those with other Arab countries, Mr. Erdogan called on President Hosni Mubarak to step down while an American envoy was still insisting that Mr. Mubarak be allowed to serve out his term.

But Turkey has suffered setbacks elsewhere. In Iraq, a coalition it helped create — Iraqiya, led by Ayad Allawi — lost to the coalition led by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, despite winning the single largest bloc of Parliament seats in March 2010 elections. (Mr. Allawi himself was almost completely marginalized in the negotiations that ensued.) There remains skepticism in Turkey over Mr. Maliki’s ability to hold the country together and defuse sectarian tensions after the American military withdraws by a deadline of year’s end.

Turkish diplomats sought to reach a negotiated solution in Libya, but complain that Libyan officials lied to them about their willingness to impose a cease-fire. Turkish officials said they would court the Libyan opposition more aggressively and publicly in coming weeks.

They have stopped short of that call in Syria, with which Turkey almost went to war in 1998 over Syrian support for Kurdish guerrillas. Since then, Turkey has promoted its relationship with Syria as a model for its ties with other Arab countries. The two have held joint cabinet meetings and even military exercises. Trade has tripled in three years, and Mr. Assad and Mr. Erdogan are said to be fond of each other.

“The two countries have intimate relations, and Turkey is immersed in the Syrian political game,” said Burhan Ghalioun, director of the Center for Contemporary Oriental Studies at the Sorbonne in Paris. But, he added: “Turkey is warning Syria. Turkey is saying that it has strategic interests in Syria, and it cannot afford to let Syria explode.”

Turkey has sought to hedge its bets, hosting leaders of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood and allowing a meeting of the opposition in Istanbul. That has angered Syrian officials, who insist that the uprising is being plotted abroad. In a possible sign of tension, a Turkish Foreign Ministry official said no more delegations were planned to Damascus.

“The Syrian government is furious at Turkish officials whom they considered friends only yesterday,” said a Syrian analyst in Damascus who asked not to be named.

So far, Turkish officials have pushed Syria for far broader reforms, including an attempt at national reconciliation and dialogue that would ostensibly bring in the banned Brotherhood. Officials say there is a sense in Ankara that Mr. Assad wants reform but is stymied by more obstinate forces in the ruling elite, a point echoed by Mr. Erdogan.

“He says, ‘I will do it,’?” he said in a television interview. “But I am having a hard time understanding if he is being prevented from doing it or if he is hesitating.”

Reporting was contributed by Sebnem Arsu from Istanbul, Hwaida Saad and Nada Bakri from Beirut, and an employee of The New York Times from Damascus, Syria.

 

Unrest Around the Arab World Endangers Turkey’s Newfound Influence

 

In a few short years, Turkey has emerged as the Middle East’s most dynamic power. But weeks of Turkish diplomacy in Libya collapsed Monday, and Turkey’s prime minister bluntly called for Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi to step down. A similar situation may await in Syria, where President Bashar al-Assad has personally promised Turkish leaders to undertake reform while persisting with his crackdown.

In neighboring Iraq, Turkey fears the inability of the government there to keep the country stable as the United States completes its military withdrawal. And Lebanon, where Turkey enjoys access to both Hezbollah and its foes, is now entering a fourth month without a government.

Before the so-called Arab Spring unleashed by revolution in Egypt and Tunisia, Turkey was a catalyst in an emerging realignment of the Middle East, charting a foreign policy often independent of the United States in a region bereft of any country that matched its political stature. Now the unrest on its borders is undermining years of diplomatic and economic investment, forcing Turkey to take a more assertive role as its vision of economic integration runs up against the threat of growing instability.

“In the face of this unpredictable change around the Arab world, Turkish foreign policy is facing a major setback,” said Sami Kohen, a columnist for Milliyet, a daily newspaper in Turkey. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan “has started losing the leaderships in the Arab world that he trusted and considered important, one after the other.”

Syria, beset by a six-week uprising, may prove his greatest challenge, as it broadly echoes the experience of its Arab neighbors over the past four months. In Tunisia, Egypt and now Libya and Yemen, governments have resisted surrendering some power to stay in office, only to eventually face the prospect of losing all power. Syria’s leader, too, is rebuffing calls for change.

“Outside actors possess little leverage,” the International Crisis Group said Tuesday in a statement on Syria. “Even countries that have developed close ties to Damascus, such as Turkey, are viewed with growing suspicion by officials who are increasingly paranoid and consider anything short of outright support an act of betrayal.”

In past weeks, Turkish diplomacy has been especially intense with Syria, which it considers its most immediate concern as a linchpin in its regional strategy of greater economic integration. Mr. Assad and Mr. Erdogan have spoken on the phone at least three times, and the Turkish intelligence chief, an official with deep knowledge of Syrian affairs, has visited Damascus twice since the uprising began in March. Their message, officials say, was that time was running out for reform.

In language that echoed Mr. Erdogan’s statement to Colonel Qaddafi, he warned Syria’s government against a repetition of Hama, where the Syrian military crushed an Islamist revolt in 1982, killing at least 10,000 people and perhaps far more.

“Turkey needs Syria more than it needs the Syrian regime,” said a Damascus-based analyst who requested anonymity, given the delicacy of the subject.

From Iraq to North Africa, Turkey’s growing profile in the Arab world has emerged as one of the region’s most remarkable dynamics. Trade with Iraq was about $6 billion in 2010, almost double what it was in 2008. There, and in Syria, visa restrictions were removed, facilitating trade across booming border regions that helped reconnect cities like Aleppo, Syria, to their historic hinterlands. About 25,000 Turkish workers flocked to Libya for sprawling construction jobs. Turkish pop culture is everywhere: the star of one action series, “Valley of the Wolves,” is so famous that he lends his name to Iraqi cafes.

Since January, Turkey has sought to protect those gains, while negotiating the tumult in the region. Though Turkey’s ties with Egypt lacked the depth of those with other Arab countries, Mr. Erdogan called on President Hosni Mubarak to step down while an American envoy was still insisting that Mr. Mubarak be allowed to serve out his term.

But Turkey has suffered setbacks elsewhere. In Iraq, a coalition it helped create — Iraqiya, led by Ayad Allawi — lost to the coalition led by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, despite winning the single largest bloc of Parliament seats in March 2010 elections. (Mr. Allawi himself was almost completely marginalized in the negotiations that ensued.) There remains skepticism in Turkey over Mr. Maliki’s ability to hold the country together and defuse sectarian tensions after the American military withdraws by a deadline of year’s end.

Turkish diplomats sought to reach a negotiated solution in Libya, but complain that Libyan officials lied to them about their willingness to impose a cease-fire. Turkish officials said they would court the Libyan opposition more aggressively and publicly in coming weeks.

They have stopped short of that call in Syria, with which Turkey almost went to war in 1998 over Syrian support for Kurdish guerrillas. Since then, Turkey has promoted its relationship with Syria as a model for its ties with other Arab countries. The two have held joint cabinet meetings and even military exercises. Trade has tripled in three years, and Mr. Assad and Mr. Erdogan are said to be fond of each other.

“The two countries have intimate relations, and Turkey is immersed in the Syrian political game,” said Burhan Ghalioun, director of the Center for Contemporary Oriental Studies at the Sorbonne in Paris. But, he added: “Turkey is warning Syria. Turkey is saying that it has strategic interests in Syria, and it cannot afford to let Syria explode.”

Turkey has sought to hedge its bets, hosting leaders of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood and allowing a meeting of the opposition in Istanbul. That has angered Syrian officials, who insist that the uprising is being plotted abroad. In a possible sign of tension, a Turkish Foreign Ministry official said no more delegations were planned to Damascus.

“The Syrian government is furious at Turkish officials whom they considered friends only yesterday,” said a Syrian analyst in Damascus who asked not to be named.

So far, Turkish officials have pushed Syria for far broader reforms, including an attempt at national reconciliation and dialogue that would ostensibly bring in the banned Brotherhood. Officials say there is a sense in Ankara that Mr. Assad wants reform but is stymied by more obstinate forces in the ruling elite, a point echoed by Mr. Erdogan.

“He says, ‘I will do it,’?” he said in a television interview. “But I am having a hard time understanding if he is being prevented from doing it or if he is hesitating.”

Reporting was contributed by Sebnem Arsu from Istanbul, Hwaida Saad and Nada Bakri from Beirut, and an employee of The New York Times from Damascus, Syria.

 

Security Forces Kill Dozens in Uprisings Around Syria

  Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesA picture taken by a mobile phone shows anti-government protesters in Banias in northeastern Syria on Friday.

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Security forces in Syria met thousands of demonstrators with fusillades of live ammunition after noon prayers on Friday, killing at least 81 people in the bloodiest day of the five-week-old Syrian uprising, according to protesters, witnesses and accounts on social networking sites.

TimesCast | Syrian Violence Continues Anti-government protesters march during a demonstration following Friday prayers near Damascus, Syria, on Friday.

From the Mediterranean coast and Kurdish east to the steppe of the Houran in southern Syria, protesters gathered in at least 20 cities and towns, including in the outskirts of the capital, Damascus. Cries for vengeance intersected with calls for the government’s fall, marking a potentially dangerous new dynamic in the revolt.

“We want revenge, and we want blood,” said Abu Mohamed, a protester in Azra, a southern town that had the highest death toll Friday. “Blood for blood.”

The breadth of the protests — and people’s willingness to defy security forces who were deployed en masse — painted a picture of turmoil in one of the Arab world’s most authoritarian countries. In scenes unprecedented only weeks ago, protesters tore down pictures of President Bashar al-Assad and toppled statues of his father, Hafez, in two towns on the capital’s outskirts, according to witnesses and video footage.

But despite the bloodshed, which promised to unleash another day of unrest as the dead are buried Saturday, the scale of the protests, so far, seemed to fall short of the popular upheaval of revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia. Organizers said the movement was still in its infancy, and the government, building on 40 years of institutional inertia, still commanded the loyalty of the military, economic elite and sizable minorities of Christian and heterodox Muslim sects who fear the state’s collapse.

Coming a day after Mr. Assad endorsed the lifting of draconian emergency rule, the killings represented another chapter in the government’s strategy of alternating promises of concessions with a grim crackdown that has left it staggering but still entrenched.

“There are indications the regime is scared, and this is adding to the momentum, but this is still the beginning,” said Wissam Tarif, the executive director of Insan, a Syrian human rights group. “Definitely, we haven’t seen the millions we saw in Egypt or Tunisia. The numbers are still humble, and it’s a reality we have to acknowledge.”

The images of carnage marked one of the deadliest days of the so-called Arab Spring, and the coming days may be replete with its lessons. In other places in the Middle East, violence has led to funerals where many more are often killed. The government’s belated attempts at reform, meanwhile, have often simply escalated protesters’ demands.

In that, the government faces perhaps its greatest challenge: to maintain its bastions of support with promises for the future and threats that its collapse means chaos, against the momentum that the vivid symbols of martyrdom have so often encouraged.

“We are not scared anymore,” said Abu Nadim, a protester in Douma, a town on the outskirts of Damascus. “We are sad and we are disappointed at this regime and at the president. Protests, demonstrations and death are now part of the daily routine.”

In a sharply worded statement, President Obama said the “outrageous use of violence to quell protests must come to an end now.” The statement also said President Assad was seeking Iranian help in repressing his people, but did not provide details.

In the capital, a city that underlines the very authority of the Assad family’s decades of rule, hundreds gathered after Friday Prayer at the al-Hassan Mosque. Some of them chanted, “The people want the fall of the government,” a slogan made famous in both Egypt and Tunisia. But security forces quickly dispersed the protests with tear gas, witnesses said. Syria’s second-largest city, Aleppo, appeared to remain relatively quiet.

The government’s determination to keep larger cities somewhat subdued may have led to some of the highest death tolls. Protesters in some towns on Damascus’s outskirts said security forces fired at them to prevent them from marching toward the capital. And in Azra, protesters said, government forces were intent on keeping them from Dara’a, a poor town 20 miles away that helped unleash the revolt in March.

Hwaida Saad contributed reporting from Beirut, Katherine Zoepf from New York, and employees of The New York Times from Beirut and Damascus, Syria.

 

Japan Considers Tightening Access Around Nuclear Plant

The national government is reviewing with local governments the possibility of establishing a “caution zone” around the power plant with a radius of 12 miles said Yukio Edano, the chief secretary of Japan’s cabinet. Such a zone would be legally enforceable, in contrast with the current evacuation, which is technically voluntary.

As most radiation releases from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station have been stopped, some families have been re-entering the area in recent days to remove belongings and some journalists have been exploring it. Dozens of families never left after the initial evacuation was ordered in stages nearly six weeks ago, following an earthquake and tsunami on March 11.

Growing activity in the evacuation area has prompted concern among evacuees that their homes may be robbed while they are away. Nuclear power experts have been debating whether the continued movement of people, livestock and vehicles in the area will make it harder to decontaminate after the nuclear power plant has been fully stabilized.

Noriyuki Shikata, a senior government spokesman, said on Tuesday that the government did not have the legal authority to prevent people from entering and leaving the evacuation zone, nor the legal authority to evict those who stayed behind. Media reports have suggested that as many as 200 households are still occupied in the zone, mainly elderly people who refuse to live at evacuation centers in gymnasiums or farmers who refuse to abandon their livestock.

Plans for a caution zone were reported by the Asahi Shimbun newspaper, which said that the government also intended to allow residents to make brief trips into the zone to recover essentials from their homes.

The Sankei Shimbun newspaper reported on its Web site on Wednesday morning that residents of Minami-Soma city, which lies partly inside the northern side of the evacuation zone, were being given fliers warning that a legally enforceable caution zone could be created.

A spokesman for the Fukushima Prefecture police, whose jurisdiction encompasses the evacuation zone, said that the police have done spot checks on 3,378 addresses in the area during the past three weeks and found people at 63 sites; those people were asked to leave. According to the Japanese cabinet, there were 78,200 residents of the area inside the 12-mile radius before the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident.

Mr. Edano, the second-ranking government official in Japan, said at a follow-up news conference on Wednesday afternoon that Prime Minister Naoto Kan would travel on Thursday to Fukushima to meet the prefecture’s governor and visit evacuation centers in two cities in the prefecture. Mr. Edano declined to predict whether a caution zone would be imposed.

Decontamination of a large area after a nuclear accident consists of very carefully mapping the “hot spots” where wind and rain may have concentrated radioactive fallout. Contaminated objects are then sent to a specially lined landfill; even the dirt may have to be dug up if contamination is high enough.

Michael Friedlander, a former nuclear power plant operator in the United States and nuclear emergency specialist who now lives in Hong Kong, said in interviews last week and this week that it was very important to prevent unnecessary activity in the evacuation zone. He contended car tires and other movement could result in smearing around the radioactive dust from the invisible hot spots, making it necessary to decontaminate other areas as well or leaving other areas with low levels of contamination.

But Michael Corradini, the chairman of engineering physics at the University of Wisconsin, said that with power crews already setting up electricity transmission lines across the evacuation zone to the damaged power plant, and with heavy repair equipment being brought in as well to the power plant, the movement of private individuals and their vehicles would probably not have much additional effect in spreading out the hot spots.

Another 62,400 people lived between 12 and 19 miles from the power plant. People living inside the larger area were initially told to stay indoors, but have since been asked to leave voluntarily, along with residents of five other communities outside the zone that also received some radioactive fallout because of wind and rain patterns. The cabinet has not released an estimate for the population of the other five communities.

After the Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986, the former Soviet Union established a more stringently enforced exclusion zone with an initial radius of about 19 miles. The exact boundaries of the zone were later adjusted to reflect actual patterns of fallout. Wind and rain had pushed particularly heavy fallout to the north of the reactor that caught fire.

Japan has been fortunate in that weather patterns appear to have pushed much of the radiation straight east and out to sea, with the exception of one plume that fell on land to the northwest of the reactor.

Many of the wind gauges and other meteorological equipment close to the site were destroyed by the tsunami and earthquake. Masanori Shinano, a technical counselor at Japan’s Nuclear Safety Commission, said last week that the government had needed to estimate wind direction to calculate the total radiation released by the accident. The agency looked at weather forecasts for those days around the Fukushima area, which are generated from computer models using other weather stations, and concluded from the forecasts that the wind was mainly blowing out to sea during the days of the greatest release of airborne radioactive material.

The commission, a panel of independent experts, estimates that the total radiation released by the Fukushima accident was one-sixth of that at Chernobyl. Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, which has a history of being close to the nuclear industry, estimates that the total release was a tenth of Chernobyl’s.

Ken Ijichi, Moshe Komata and Kantaro Suzuki contributed reporting.