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Volcano Erupts on Southern Japanese Island


A video grab from the Japan Meteorological Agency's live camera image shows an eruption of Mount Shindake on Kuchinoerabujima island, Kagoshima Prefecture, southwestern Japan, May 29, 2015.
A video grab from the Japan Meteorological Agency's live camera image shows an eruption of Mount Shindake on Kuchinoerabujima island, Kagoshima Prefecture, southwestern Japan, May 29, 2015.

A volcano on the remote southern Japanese island of Kuchinoerabujima erupted suddenly Friday, blasting plumes of black smoke high into the sky and prompting authorities to order the evacuation of the island's residents.

Mount Shindake erupted about 10 a.m. (0100 GMT). A pyroclastic flow of superheated gas and rock flowed down the side of the peak and reached the ocean, NHK said, but there were no immediate reports of injuries to the island's roughly 150 residents.

The island, part of the Ryukyu archipelago, is about 160 kilometers (100 miles) south of Kyushu Electric Power's Sendai nuclear plant on Japan's southernmost main island of Kyushu.

It was not immediately clear if the eruption would affect the power company's hopes to restart the plant, which on Wednesday cleared the last step of the nuclear regulator's stringent safety hurdles introduced after the Fukushima Daiichi disaster in 2011.

Japan is one of the world's most seismically active nations, and there has been a surge in volcanic activity in recent weeks.

Some information for this report came from AP.

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    Reuters

    Reuters is a news agency founded in 1851 and owned by the Thomson Reuters Corporation based in Toronto, Canada. One of the world's largest wire services, it provides financial news as well as international coverage in over 16 languages to more than 1000 newspapers and 750 broadcasters around the globe.

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