The Tokyo Electric Power Company will start handing out checks "as smoothly and as early as possible," hopefully by April 28, its president, Masataka Shimizu, told reporters. Sole residents will receive 750,000 yen and multi-person households will get 1 million, Shimizu said, with the company's interim cost estimated at about US$600 million.

A government committee ordered the payments as an advance on the compensation that Tokyo Electric will owe nearby residents and businesses for the month-old crisis at Fukushima Daiichi, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said on April 15.

Tokyo Electric offered a token payment to residents of 10 municipalities around the plant in early April. But officials in one of those towns, Namie, rejected the offer, saying it amounted to about US$12 for each of its roughly 20,000 residents.

Tokyo Electric has no timetable for resolving the accident, and the yet-unknown cost of compensation has called the survival of Japan's largest utility into question. The Japanese government has agreed to support the company to keep power flowing to its 25 million customers without big rate increases, Deputy Finance Minister Fumihiko Igarashi said.

About 78,000 people living within 20 kilometers (12.4 miles) of the plant were ordered out of their homes in the days after the March 11 accident, which now is ranked at the top of the international scale for nuclear disasters. Those living another 10 kilometers out were told to remain indoors as the plant belched radioactive particles into the environment from three damaged reactors.