The head of the UN's nuclear watchdog said the agency is considering opening a branch office in Fukushima to monitor efforts to contain the world's worst atomic accident since Chernobyl, a report said.

The Japanese government has struggled with public trust over nuclear energy since the March 11 disaster and had asked the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to open an office, which will help share information on the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi plant.

"We have told the Japanese government that the IAEA stands ready to cooperate," the agency's chief Yukiya Amano told Kyodo News on Saturday in the Swiss resort of Davos.

"While the headquarters in Vienna will continue to deal with issues related to the decontamination and disposal of spent nuclear fuels, we'll be able to have close contact."

A press officer for the IAEA in Tokyo, who is accompanying an ongoing mission to Japan, said no firm decision had yet been made, but that the government's request was being given "careful consideration."

The vast majority of Japan's 54 commercial nuclear reactors are offline because popular opposition has prevented them being restarted in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear crisis.

Meanwhile, Japanese manufacturer's greenhouse gas emissions are rising after the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster, hurting the country's carbon reduction goals, a report said.

The trend will deal a blow to Japan's target of reducing emissions by six percent from 1990 levels between 2008 and 2012 under the Kyoto Protocol, the Nikkei business daily reported yesterday.

Emissions by 399 leading manufacturers are projected to rise 0.2 percent year-on-year to about 388 million tons in the year to March 2012, the second straight annual rise, according to a Nikkei survey.

AFP