A high court on Thursday ordered the operator of the crippled Fukushima power plant to pay 730 million yen ($7 million) in damages to evacuees from the 2011 tsunami-triggered nuclear disaster, up 120 million yen from a lower court ruling.

In the lawsuit at the Sendai High Court, 216 plaintiffs, most of whom are evacuees from areas within 30 kilometers of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, had appealed a total of 1.88 billion yen in compensation from Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc.

The latest ruling is the first handed down by a high court among 30 similar lawsuits filed nationwide by evacuees and victims seeking damages from the power company alone or both the utility and the state.

"TEPCO knew around April 2008 that there was the possibility of a tsunami that could be high enough to reach the site of the Fukushima Daiichi power plant and might cause the failure of the safety function intended to halt the nuclear reactor," said Presiding Judge Hisaki Kobayashi when handing down the ruling.

"The accident occurred while countermeasure construction had been postponed. From the victims' point of view, this is the thing that TEPCO should have the greatest amount of regret over," he said.

The high court said that the amount granted in the first ruling did not fully reflect the plaintiffs' mental suffering.

In the previous ruling at the Iwaki branch of the Fukushima District Court in March 2018, 213 out of 216 plaintiffs were awarded compensation of between 700,000 yen and 1.5 million yen per person, depending on where the victims were living.

Both the utility and the plaintiffs had appealed to the high court.

"It is a fair ruling," said Tokuo Hayakawa, the head of the plaintiffs. "We cannot go back to our daily lives even if the evacuation orders are lifted."

Tokyo Electric said in a release that it is considering how to respond to the latest ruling.

The plaintiffs had lowered the amount of the claim from 13.3 billion yen in the latest lawsuit to avoid a possible prolonged trial that could raise court costs and may have undermined the amount of money they could receive in the end.

The plaintiffs had argued that the operator could have foreseen the accident caused by the tsunami based on the government's 2002 long-term assessment of major quakes, and demanded compensation for their "loss of hometown" in addition to the amount already paid by the power company.

TEPCO, meanwhile, maintains it could not have predicted the tsunami and claimed the damages have been paid to the evacuees in accordance with the government's compensation guidelines.

==Kyodo

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