Anti-nuclear and environmental groups are petitioning the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to expand evacuation and emergency planning zones around the country's 104 reactors.

Thirty-seven groups including Beyond Nuclear and the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League say current standards are insufficient and would not protect the public in light of Japan's nuclear crisis last March.

NRC should expand its emergency planning zones from the current standard of 10 miles up to 25 miles, the groups said. Within those areas, NRC has a variety of methods for preventing the public from inhaling airborne radioactive material during an accident, including sheltering and evacuating people in phases and supplying potassium iodide pills.

The groups want NRC to double the size of planned "ingestion pathway" zones -- where the commission monitors food, milk and water for radiation -- from 50 miles to 100 miles around reactors.

Opponents of nuclear power have repeatedly pointed to NRC's call for expanded evacuation of U.S. citizens in Japan last March after a massive earthquake and tsunami struck the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, triggering explosions and radioactive leaks.

Shortly after the incident, NRC called for the evacuation of all U.S. citizens within 50 miles of the plant, which exceeded Japanese officials' call for a 12-mile evacuation zone. NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko later said the recommendation came amid confusion and sparse information from Japan and that it was made based on the assessment of conditions at the site as they were understood at the time (Greenwire, Nov. 28, 2011).

The agency's action during that crisis highlights the need to expand the zones in the United States, the groups say.

"Eighty percent of the airborne radiation released from Fukushima went directly over the Pacific Ocean," Michael Mariotte, executive director of Nuclear Information and Resource Service, said in a statement. "Even so, the Fukushima evacuation zone extended more than 25 miles to the northwest of the site, and the NRC and U.S. State Department both recommended that U.S. citizens within 50 miles of Fukushima evacuate."

Mariotte said such evacuations could not be effectively conducted in the United States under current NRC regulations.

Utilities and state and local governments should also practice emergency drills for natural disasters that include responses to nuclear plant accidents, the groups recommended. Companies are not required to conduct evacuations around nuclear plants during such drills, but Fukushima highlighted that the two are linked, they said.

Click here to read the petition.