Matt Nolan said:
Everything on this planet is radioactive.
I like it when things are put into perspective.
And allow me to add smoking to your list. It produces high intake of direct radiation -- for the smoker, not the people around! Knowing it, do I stop smoking? Nope.
I'm not sure about the radiation levels inside the exclusion zone, but TBH, at this point, I think, it doesn't really matter. It's a huge area including once fertile land that is lost for quite some time. Clean-up of the plant is estimated to take four decades at least; time it takes for the area to become habitable again, nobody knows. Background radiation due to substances is too high in the zone, legally, to let people return to their homes. A few did anyway, but mostly people aged 50 or 60+, arguing to authorities that if they developed leathal cancer after 40 years... ... Now make of that what you want.
Would I travel and spend time in Fukushima City (outside the exclusion zone)? Sure, why not, I'd even stay for a week or two, maybe a month if I had to, no problem. Would I move and want to live there with my family? No, even if they asked me to.
More perspective: Background radiation in Tokyo doubled on average after the accident (plant is more than 200 km away) -- yet it was still lower than in New York on average even back then, with tendency falling very slowly but steadily. People around the world know this, and that's why annual tourist numbers have seen record highs over the last couple of years (also/mainly thanks to a cheap yen).
And yet more perspective: There have been many "hot spots" with too high levels of radiation scattered all around northern Japan (due to fallout in rain in April 2011), as well as in Tokyo and even in parts a long way south of Tokyo. Most of these areas are being taken care of (more or less successfully), or at least are known by now (often thanks to municipalities and private local people taking measurements). They even found hot spots totally unrelated to the nuclear accident. Stuff that had been dumped or forgotten in the ground decades ago. So you could say that, today, Japan is probably the most closely radiation monitored country in the world. Monitoring groups were/are: Japanese government, US military, Green Peace, IAEA, several independent Technical Relief Organizations, municipalities, private people. The numbers (I'd think for almost all areas except maybe immediate vecinity of the plant) are mostly there in the open and they do not vary much. Granted, some of these numbers are published in Japanese only.
In sum, background radition outside the exclusion zone (there are still big problems even outside the zone, but these are/could be manageable, at least in principle, cos mainly a question of cost!) -- in sum,
background radiation outside the exclusion zone is not really the issue. Still I like it when things are put into perspective. So please come to Japan, it's an interesting country.
