The owners of the crippled Fukushima Daiichi power plant must start paying up to 1 million yen ($12,000) per household to residents displaced or forced indoors by the nuclear accident there, Japan's government ordered Friday.

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 $600 million.