Reactor Status
Reactor 1: Melted down
Reactor 2: Scrammed
Reactor 3: Scrammed
Reactor 4: Shut down
Reactor 5: Shut down
Reactor 6: Shut down
The hundreds of thousands of people who had fled their homes the day before awoke to a very different Japan on March 12. Friday morning had been full of routines for most: packing school lunches, eating a hasty breakfast before work, catching the bus. By Saturday, the routines of their previous lives had come to a sudden halt. There was no longer a school or a bus. There was no kitchen to make breakfast in. Saturday was a day to take stock.
More than 400,000 people were without homes. Many were stranded on rooftops and hills, surrounded by the water and wreckage left behind by the tsunami.
While the basic facts of the earthquake and tsunami were the same for everyone on the Tohoku coast, the details for each town were unique. The earthquake had caused much of the coast to sink, and water remained trapped in many towns, turning them into lakes. In others, the water had already retreated, leaving behind a thick jumble of mangled cars, destroyed boats, and crumbled buildings. Some towns were still burning as the sun rose—oil tanks and gas canisters broken open by the force of the water fueled the flames. In Ishinomaki, the Okawa Elementary School lay beneath a layer of thick, black mud that was several feet deep. It would be days before the families of the children who were lost there learned their fates.
Every survivor had a different story. Some, like Ryoichi Usuzawa, had lost their homes but still had their families. Usuzawa had found his wife the night before at the local evacuation center. Others had lost a child, or a parent, but still had the rest of their family. Many had lost their entire families. Toshikazu Abe would never see his wife or mother again.
Buildings were swept from their foundations and left in pieces up and down the coast of Tohoku. The rubble would remain for months—this photo was taken on March 25, 2011, two weeks after the tsunami.
Usuzawa, who helped out as a greeter at the evacuation center, remembered the grim accounting that the survivors went through in the days following the wave: “Someone asks you,… ‘How about your family, was everyone safe?’ and you respond, ‘Yes, we are all okay,’ but then you ask them ‘How about you?’ and they say something like, ‘We had a family of five but now we are three…’ All I could do was hug them.”
Help would not be coming anytime soon. Cell phone service was down, and landlines were nonexistent. In some cases, there wasn’t anyone to call, anyway. Fire stations, police stations, and municipal centers had been carried away with everything else. The Tohoku region, dotted with tiny farming and fishing villages, is famous for its remoteness at the best of times. Now, with roads blocked and crumbled, it would take days for any help to come from the outside. So the survivors of the tsunami began the hard work of finding food, shelter, and missing loved ones on their own. They had no way of knowing about the disaster that was unfolding at the Fukushima Daiichi plant.
A woman searches among the mud and rubble in Otsuchi for her missing nephew five days after the tsunami.
* * *
The uranium pellets that form nuclear fuel rods are held together by a thin coating, called cladding, of the metal zirconium. Under normal conditions, the zirconium does its job well, reinforcing the sturdy rods without getting in the way of zinging neutrons. But zirconium has one drawback: At extremely high heat, it reacts with steam. That reaction produces potentially explosive hydrogen gas—lots of it—and Fukushima Daiichi had passed that temperature threshold hours before. Hydrogen gas was building up in reactor 1, and the increasing volume of the gas, combined with the steam created by decay, was making the pressure in the containment vessel climb. By 11:00 P.M. the night before, the pressure had already exceeded the maximum that the vessel was meant to hold. That posed a serious problem for getting water into the reactor, and it was also dangerous in its own right. If the pressure got high enough, the vessel could break open, sending radiation into the air around the reactor. Operators needed to get water into the reactor to slow the runaway reactions. Their best bet for doing that was to vent steam through the torus.
The torus, or suppression pool, sits like a giant hollow doughnut below the reactor vessel. When pressure in the reactor gets too high, a safety valve opens and allows steam to escape into the torus, where it condenses back into water. Steam that passes through the torus is scrubbed of most of its radioactive isotopes before it leaves the building, a vast improvement over allowing the steam to enter the environment without any intervention.
But before operators could open the vents, which would likely still release some radioactive steam into the air, they needed approval from the government. And they needed to give residents of the nearby towns time to evacuate.
Operators also needed to find a way to open two valves without working controls. That would mean sending workers into the reactor building, where the radiation levels had been rising.
Supervisors planned to send teams in one at a time to make rescue easier in case they ran into problems. To reduce the danger of health effects that might appear later, they opted for older volunteers. Still, when Takeyuki Inagaki, a maintenance manager, asked for volunteers for the dangerous job, many young workers raised their hands. He was moved to tears. “To go into a pitch-black reactor building, with the containment pressure so high…,” he later remembered, “it felt like we were putting together a suicide squad.”
It would be a grueling task, so they selected workers who they thought were strong enough to complete it successfully and divided them into teams of three. Then the teams began training for their mission, practicing to make sure they knew where they needed to go inside the darkened building. Superintendent Yoshida told his team they would need to be ready to vent by 9:00 A.M. But they weren’t idle in the hours before then.
Overnight, other response teams had been formed to clean up debris so workers could get to the reactor buildings, and to set up vital systems to get power and water to them. One worker remembered seeing some of the members of those response teams in the emergency response center as they were getting ready to go out to the reactors. “I’ll never forget the expressions on the faces of the employees assembled into those response teams,” he later said. “Their faces, in the face of lethal danger, were white as a sheet … Every single one of them was trembling; they were truly scared.”
A working generator to power the lights in the reactor 1 control room had finally been found, taking the operators out of the dark for the first time in hours. One of the teams had labored throughout the night to lay a high-voltage cable that could carry electricity to units 1 and 2 from an electrical truck. Starting around midnight, forty workers had begun laying 650 feet—about 3,000 pounds’ worth—of the heavy cable. It was slow going. Hundreds of aftershocks rocked the plant overnight. When a particularly large one hit, the workers had to scurry back to safety for an hour to make sure that another tsunami wouldn’t be following. At 4:00 A.M., radiation levels outside the unit 1 reactor had begun to rise, and the workers had to stop yet again.
At 5:44 A.M. on Saturday, the prime minister of Japan, Naoto Kan, issued the evacuation order for everyone within 6 miles of the plant—about 45,000 people altogether. For many of the refugees sheltering at evacuation centers, the order to evacuate was their first indication that something had gone seriously wrong at the nuclear plant, and it left them with a terrible choice.
A man named Noriyo Kimura had lived two miles from the plant. The tsunami had swept away his home, along with his wife, father, and a daughter. He desperately wanted to search for his missing family members. But he had one remaining daughter who had not been in the tsunami’s path. He knew that, in order to protect his surviving daughter from the radiation the plant might release, he had to abandon the faint sliver of hope that one of those swept away could have survived.
Many faced the same stark decision: Staying would e
ndanger their health and that of others who had escaped the tsunami. But evacuating meant abandoning their plans to search through the rubble for loved ones who might still be alive.
Residents in the towns of Futaba and Okuma, as well as nearby Namie and Tomioka, clambered onto buses bound for towns farther inland. Those who had working cars or places aboard buses were lucky. The governments of Okuma and Futaba found themselves overwhelmed. Jin Ishido, who was in charge of crisis management for the town of Okuma, remembers: “It was complete chaos. We were not prepared. We had no protection, no protective gear, no experts. Our communication lines were disrupted … We didn’t have contingency plans for hospitals—even the firefighters didn’t have a plan.”
At the Futaba hospital, 209 patients and the hospital staff prepared to evacuate. Finding buses to move them out proved a monumental task. Katsutaka Idogawa, the mayor of Futaba, helped organize the patients who were being evacuated, directing them onto buses to move them out of the danger zone. But 130 patients who were confined to their beds, as well as 98 residents of a nursing home who could not be moved, were left behind without staff to care for them. The staff had been told that Japan Special Defense Forces would be there soon to move the bedridden patients. In reality, it would be two days before they arrived. In the meantime, the patients were left without heat, electricity, or basic care. Four had died by the time help arrived, and fourteen more died as they were being moved. Thirty-five more patients were left behind once again and wouldn’t be rescued for two more days.
* * *
Frustrated that it was taking so long for venting to begin, Prime Minister Kan flew to the plant to meet with Yoshida at 7:00 A.M. But even with the leader of the country pushing them to move forward, the operators had to wait. They had learned that the evacuation wasn’t complete, and they did not want to vent while residents of any nearby town were still scrambling to leave.
Events at Fukushima Daiichi prevented these patients from the Futaba hospital from being evacuated before Sunday, March 13.
At 9:04, the nine volunteers finally headed for the unit 1 reactor to begin venting. The first team, which went to the second floor, managed to open its valve. But the second, which aimed to open the valve on the torus, was pushed back by heat and radiation. As they entered the basement, the sound of the steam thundering into the suppression pool was overwhelming. The torus room, normally dry, was hazy with steam. The team’s task was to open a valve that would allow steam to escape from the suppression pool through a pipe to the outside. To do that, they would need to walk out onto the surface of the torus.
One worker took a tentative step.
His shoes melted.
A team member’s dosimeter indicated that he had already been exposed to the maximum amount of radiation he was allowed to receive in a year. They had no choice but to abandon their mission.
* * *
The operators had been on shift for thirty hours since the earthquake. They had been working constantly, trying to push their exhausted brains to develop creative solutions to one problem after another. Rest wasn’t an option. They came up with a new plan to blow the valve open from a distance using an air compressor, and began to search for one in the jumbled mess of the nuclear plant. It was 2:00 P.M. before they finally found one and installed it. To the operator’s relief, the pressure in the drywell finally began to fall at about 2:30. It looked like the vent was working, letting out steam and taking the pressure off the containment structure.
In reality, the pressure may have been going down for a far more ominous reason: At the top of the containment structure is a heavy steel lid that can be opened for reactor maintenance. It normally takes a crane to move the massive dome, which is held down by dozens of oversized bolts. But the prolonged high pressure in the chamber below it had worked the bolts loose, and hydrogen gas was escaping into the reactor building.
At 3:30 on Saturday afternoon, the forty-member electrical team finally finished connecting power to the unit 1 building. Six minutes later, all of their work would be undone.
* * *
At 3:36, somewhere in the unit 1 building, a spark met the cloud of hydrogen gas. In an instant, the molecules surrounding the spark burst into flame. In just a few milliseconds more, the heat had raced through all of the gas in the building, setting it alight. Superheated air leaped outward in a thundering explosion, shredding the walls of the reactor building and sending a cloud of white smoke and debris billowing into the air. Workers, in the middle of injecting water and restoring power, were rocked by the blast. “[The] windows of the fire truck were shattered,” remembers one of them. “Things looked distorted to me for a moment. Then I felt as if I was floating at the same time as [I heard] a tremendous roaring sound … I was showered with rubble from in front like a rocket.” The control room shook and filled with a cloud of white dust. For the second time in twenty-four hours, the lights flickered out.
Encircled by hefty bolts, the primary containment vessel lid can be removed for maintenance. The many bolts were worked loose by the pressure of the hydrogen gas building up below the lid.
The “rubble” that rained down on the workers was probably pieces of the steel sheeting that had surrounded the reactor building. Debris from the explosion reached even farther afield, showering stragglers from the evacuation of Futaba. “I was in front of the hospital,” Mayor Idogawa remembers, “telling people to evacuate. Putting people on buses and cars, just sending people out. That’s when I heard the boom of the explosion. It must’ve been parts of the building and other debris that came raining down. We’re close by, so it was the heavier stuff that came down on us … And I thought, Let’s just leave this place. Just get the kids out … I just wanted everyone out.”
The unit 1 building after the explosion on March 12.
When the smoke cleared at the plant, the entire roof and top third of the reactor 1 building had been reduced to a smoking steel skeleton. Five workers had been injured.
DAY 3
evacuation
Sunday, March 13, 2011
Reactor Status
Reactor 1: Melted down/building destroyed
Reactor 2: Scrammed
Reactor 3: Scrammed
Reactor 4: Shut down
Reactor 5: Shut down
Reactor 6: Shut down
You probably think of yourself as a single, solid object. But look closer. You are really a collection of parts: organs and bones, tendons and teeth. Zoom in even more, and you’ll see cells and the molecules they are made from. Look even closer and you’ll see that you are a universe of atoms.
At the atomic level, the lines that separate our bodies from our environment are not as definite as you might think. Hold my hand, and the atoms on the surface of your skin interact with the atoms on mine. If you’re unlucky enough to do it on a cold, dry day, loose electrons might leap from my hand to yours, giving you a static electric shock.
Your atoms are tiny—so very, very small that it would take about 100,000 of them, arranged in a line, to reach across the diameter of a single hair from your head. That tininess has advantages. Our individual atoms can’t be damaged by large-scale events. Long after you die, your atoms will still be here as part of the soil, rock, water, and air—perhaps even another animal. And yet atoms can be affected by things on their own miniature scale, things so small that they are invisible to us.
It’s our atoms that make us vulnerable to radiation.
Put simply, radiation is energy. It travels through our world as particles or waves, and it is everywhere. Solar radiation warms our planet and feeds the plants we need to survive. Radio waves, another form of radiation, carry information from your Wi-Fi router to your computer and from cell phones to the nearest cell tower. Visible light is also radiation.
* * *
Each of our atoms holds protons and neutrons at its center in a super-dense mass called the nucleus. Electrons hover around the nucleus in a cloud. This tiny galaxy forms its own balance between
the positive charge of the protons in its nucleus and the negative charge of the electrons that surround them. But if a radioactive particle or wave has enough energy, it can knock electrons out of an atom altogether, creating an ion. Once an electron flies the coop, the electrical charge of the atom changes. But here’s the thing: It is the atom’s electrical charge that determines how it behaves in relationship to the atoms around it. When an atom that is part of a molecule loses an electron, it lets go of the other atoms, breaking the molecule apart and destroying our tiniest building blocks.
When two or more atoms are bonded, as in water, they form a molecule.
Radiation can be divided into different types based on the wavelengths it emits. Radiation on the low end of the spectrum (to the left on this chart) has long wavelengths and short frequencies. Only radiation of especially short lengths and high frequencies (on the right side of the chart), known as ionizing radiation, has enough energy to affect our health.
Most of the radiation that surrounds us lacks the energy to do us harm. If you arrange all of the types of radiation in the world on a chart according to the amount of energy they produce, it’s only the radiation at the top end of the lineup, called ionizing radiation, that has enough power to do damage.
How dangerous is ionizing radiation? That depends entirely on how much of it you are exposed to. Radiation can alter atoms. But the human body has more than a few to spare—altogether, there are about 7 octillion atoms in the average adult. That’s a 7 with 27 zeroes after it, or 7 billion billion billion atoms. While small doses of radiation may do some damage, they are unlikely to affect enough atoms to cause real trouble. But when the human body is exposed to massive doses of radiation, cells begin to die.
Meltdown: Earthquake, Tsunami, and Nuclear Disaster in Fukushima Page 5