The consumer advice, issued via a rapid food safety alert system on Tuesday, requires governments that conduct controls to inform the 27-nation European Union should radiation on a product exceed authorised levels.

The controls would apply to a "small quantity" of products, said the European Commission spokesman for health issues, Frederic Vincent, noting that the EU imported 9,000 tonnes of fruits and vegetables from Japan in 2010.

The EU also imports a small quantity of fish.

As Japan scrambled to prevent a nuclear meltdown, European energy commissioner Guenther Oettinger voiced surprise at the "incredible makeshift" means being used to stop the disaster at the Fukushima No.1 power plant.

"The site is effectively out of control," Oettinger told a European Parliament committee, a day after he said Japan was facing "apocalypse".

"In the coming hours there could be further catastrophic events which could pose a threat to the lives of people on the island," he said, warning that the situation was now "in the hands of God."

Japanese crews have been dumping water on the stricken power plant, which has been hit by a series of explosions after Friday's giant earthquake knocked out reactor cooling systems.

"We are very much concerned and deeply distressed at the pictures we are seeing from Japan, and we are not yet at the end of this sequence of tragic and far-reaching disastrous events," Oettinger said.

The EU official criticised the response of Japanese authorities, pointing to "divergences" between the Japanese firm Tokyo Electric Power and the government.

"There are issues of engineering competence and we have to adjust some of our views of Japanese capacities in the area of precision engineering," he said.

"The Japanese are working with fire pumps, trying to dump water by air, they don't know how to resolve this situation anymore," he said.

The ever-evolving crisis has raised public concerns about the safety of nuclear energy in Europe, where governments have agreed to test the ability of the continent's 143 reactors to withstand earthquakes, floods and even terrorist attacks.

The EU's Hungarian presidency has called an extraordinary meeting of energy ministers for Monday to assess the impact of Japan's nuclear emergency.

earlier related report
French agency says 'radioactive plume' but no risk for Tokyo
Paris (AFP) March 16, 2011 - The Fukushima accident has generated a "radioactive plume" which is likely to expand in coming days but does not present any health threat to Tokyo, the head of a French nuclear safety agency said on Wednesday.

He added, though, that there could eventually be a "strongly contaminated zone" extending up to 60 kilometres (37.5 miles) around the stricken plant.

The cloud's extent "is relatively concentrated on a zone of several dozen kilometres around the site, depending on the fluctuation of the winds, which are generally blowing towards the Pacific Ocean but not always," said Jacques Repussard, from the Institute for Radiological Protection and Nuclear Safety (IRSN).

"In the coming days, this plume will eventually reach a zone of several hundred kilometres, but our calculations show that, for example in Tokyo, exposure will not have any impact on health in any way," he told a parliamentary committee.

The Fukushima No. 1 plant, hit by a quake and tsunami on March 11, lies 250 kilometres (155 miles) northeast of the Japanese capital.

"There will be ionising radiation, there will be radioactive particles, but doses will be at levels that are far far below those that, for instance, would need iodine tablets to be taken," said Repussard said.

Potassium iodine tablets are used in nuclear emergencies to protect the thyroid against radioactive iodine, which can cause cancer.

Eventually, said Repussard, "there will be a strongly contaminated zone, in the order of 50 to 60 kilometres [31-37.5 miles] around the site."

Beyond this, "there will be measurable impacts but not dramatic impacts."

Repussard did not give details about radioactivity levels, nor did he say what he meant by a "strongly contaminated zone" or what scenario of radioactivity emissions would be needed for this to happen.

Japan has set up a 20-km (12-mile) exclusion zone around the plant and warned people living up to 10 kms (six miles) beyond this to stay indoors. More than 200,000 people have already been evacuated.

In Tokyo, the US embassy Thursday warned American citizens living within 50 miles (80 kms) of Fukushima to evacuate or seek shelter.

Repussard added that global atmospheric concentrations of caesium, a long-lasting radioactive element, would remain lower than those that prevailed in the 1950s and 1960s, when the nuclear powers at the time carried out atmospheric tests.

"We have to keep these proportions in mind so that the public does not get alarmed for the wrong reasons," he said.

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