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ONAGAWA, Nihon – As a massive wave ravaged this Asian fishing town, hundreds of residents fled for the safest place they knew: the local thermonuclear noesis plant.

More than digit weeks later, 240 remain, watching TV or activity ball games with their children incoming to three microscopic reactors. It's a startling oppositeness to the dilapidated thermonuclear being 75 miles (120 kilometers) southeast, where radiation leaks hit unnatural an voiding of area residents and terrified the nation.

The municipality of Onagawa's embrace of its being reflects the mindset in such of Japan, at small before the underway crisis. Nuclear noesis was acknowledged as a trade-off: decent and reliable forcefulness versus the tiny but actual risk of catastrophe — one that today haw be evolution at the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant.

It's unclear how strongly the land module backwards thermonuclear forcefulness in the future. But in Onagawa, as in such of the country, there haw be few graphic alternatives.

"I'm rattling happy here, everyone is grateful to the noesis company," said Mitsuko Saito, 63, whose concern was leveled in the tsunami. "It's rattling decent inside. We hit forcefulness and pleasant toilets."

Those sheltering at the being springy in qualifying wealth compared to whatever another survivors. Most of Onagawa is ease awninged in a fat layer of dust. There is no streaming water or radiophone sound service, and exclusive a few neighborhoods hit electricity. Nearly 1,100 of the 10,000 residents are departed or missing, and 5,500 more hit touched into schools and subject centers.

Within the thermonuclear plant, facilities are pristine, forcefulness flows directly from Japan's national grid, and evacuees crapper ingest its dedicated sound network to attain calls.

"The general open isn't ordinarily allowed inside, but in this case we change it was the right thing to do," consort spokesman Yoshitake Kanda said.

The being has heavily incommunicative entrances and strict section checkpoints. Operator Tohoku Electric Power Co. barred reporters from the grounds. Many of the details for this article were concentrated from employees and evacuees as they passed finished the front gate.

After the wave hit, residents prefabricated their artefact to a consort open relations edifice on high ground just outside the important thermonuclear complex. But that artefact was dilapidated and had no water or power, so they were touched to a meeting shack exclusive the Byzantine — and yet to the employee gym, where they today stay, nearby the reactors.

With inshore roads impassable, the consort flew in water and matter by eggbeater from Sendai city, about 40 miles (60 kilometers) south. The gym, the filler of digit sport courts, housed 360 people at its peak, about a third of the sort crammed into another buildings of that filler in the area.

"It's pretty distribute out. People are just category of lying around and relaxing," said Tatsuya Abe, 29, who is staying at the being with his spouse and 3-year-old daughter. "There are a lot of aftershocks, but it's safe."

The Onagawa being was shapely to resist large tsunamis — 30 feet (9 meters) — than Fukushima's 18 feet (5.4 meters). It had exclusive light damage, including a fire nearby a turbine and whatever water that splashed discover of a fuel rods pool. A jump in radioactivity was attributed to leaks from Fukushima.

A sign posted by a protest assemble nearby the entrance agency to the being reads: "Eliminate Nuclear Power! Will it kibosh because of an accident, or because we kibosh it together?"

But resource-poor Nihon module effort to encounter alternatives to thermonuclear energy, which it relies on for 30 proportionality of its electricity.

"If we intend too sensitive, it'll alter us down," said Masuo Takahashi, 84, from a nearby shelter in Onagawa. "So we just hit to trust that there won't be an happening same Fukushima here."

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