Nearly three-quarters of Japanese companies support abandoning nuclear power after last year's Fukushima disaster, although a majority set the condition that alternative energy resources must be secured, a Reuters poll showed on Friday.

The poll offers fresh evidence of the deep public distrust of nuclear power, the role of which the government is reconsidering after the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami that wrecked the Fukushima nuclear plant, triggering a radiation crisis that caused mass evacuations and widespread contamination.

The radiation released in the first days of the Fukushima nuclear disaster was almost 2-1/2 times the amount first estimated by Japanese safety regulators, the operator of the crippled plant said in a report released on Thursday.

Tokyo Electric Power said its own analysis conducted over the past year put the amount of radiation released in the first three weeks of the accident at about one-sixth the radiation released during the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.

Spikes in radiation caused by the Fukushima nuclear disaster were below cancer-causing levels in almost all of Japan, but infants in one town appear to be at a higher risk of developing thyroid cancer, the World Health Organization said on Wednesday.

In a preliminary report, independent experts said that people in two locations in Fukushima Prefecture may have received a radiation dose of 10-50 millisieverts (mSv) in the year after the accident at the power station operated by TEPCO.

Radiation doses received after the Fukushima nuclear accident last year were below international reference levels in all but two locations in Japan and below the level seen as "very small" in neighbouring countries, the World Health Organization said on Wednesday.

The preliminary report by independent experts found that, using conservative assumptions, people in two locations of relatively high exposure in Fukushima prefecture may have received a dose of 10-50 millisieverts (mSv) in the year after the accident at the power station operated by TEPCO.

British MPs and members of the European Parliament have signed a letter from South Asian anti-nuclear groups to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh expressing "deep concern" over human rights and environmental issues around the controversial Kudankulam Nuclear Power Project (KKNPP) which they argue "violates" the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)’s safety guidelines.

The overconfidence shown by Indian officials on nuclear safety is unfounded and alarming
MV Ramana, Physicist, Program On Science and Global Security, Princeton University