by Craig Nelson
Though Tokyo Electric insisted it didn’t need any help, the United States next sent in a team of nuclear consultants. “Everything in their system is built to build consensus slowly,” one of them said. “And everything in this crisis is about moving quickly. It’s not working.” The Americans waited until the crisis so worsened that they warned of countless emergency workers losing their lives to safeguard Japan from nuclear catastrophe. One adviser, Robert Gale, had worked in Chernobyl and described how of the two hundred workers there who were overdosed, thirteen had to get bone marrow transplants. He recommended TEPCO harvest and store blood cells from its workers beginning immediately. Though the Japanese nuclear industry had developed robots to use in accidents, all but two of them were given to a college and a museum in 2006, and Fukushima had to instead use loaner American ones from iRobot, maker of Roomba.
The US navy then arrived; the USS Ronald Reagan Carrier Strike Group ferried out a posse of H-60 helicopters to deliver supplies and rescue the desperate. But after a mere eighteen hours, sailors had been stricken with thirty times the normal dose of radiation, and the ships had to be repositioned away from the prevailing easterly winds.
A broken valve had kept workers from venting Reactor #2 and pumping in seawater that would stop a meltdown. By Tuesday morning, March 15, that valve was fixed, but earthquake-caused leaks kept the fuel rods from being fully covered. The reactor then exploded. Later that day, spokesman Edano announced, “Number Four is currently burning, and we assume radiation is being released. We are trying to put out the fire and cool down the reactor. There were no fuel rods in the reactor, but spent fuel rods are inside. [This] did not pose an imminent threat.” After discovering that 70 percent of Unit 1’s rods were damaged and 33 percent of Unit 2’s, the government announced there had been a partial meltdown in the cores.
In the wake of the explosions, the evacuation zone increased from ten to twenty kilometers (twelve miles). Twenty kilometers means 185,000 refugees; eventually the Japanese evacuated 210,000 people from a twelve-mile radius around the plant (the Americans suggested the zone be fifty miles, which was what British, French, Italian, and US citizens in Japan followed). A full meltdown would mean 150 miles, and that would include Tokyo’s 35 million people. At the same time as Daiichi, three other TEPCO nuclear power stations were in trouble, one, Daini, a mere seventy-five miles outside the capital. To protect against radioactive-iodine-induced throat cancer, 230,000 doses of potassium iodide were given to residents near both Daiichi and Daini.
At the Fukushima town of Namie, thousands began to flee. With no instructions from Tokyo, local officials believed that prevailing southerly winter winds meant the townspeople should caravan north. For three nights, as four reactors exploded in hydrogen leaks and sent off radioactive plume after plume into the air, the people of Namie exiled themselves to Tsushima, making rice with water from a mountain brook, their children playing out in the open air.
Two months later, town leaders found out that a government computer program had shown radioactive winds bearing down directly on Tsushima—but no one was informed. Politicians in Tokyo didn’t want the public to know how severe the crisis was and they didn’t want to expand the evacuation zone beyond the twelve-mile radius so they kept all the data to themselves. Tsushima would have to be evacuated after tests found clouds had rained down radioactive cesium and iodine. Namie’s mayor said there was a word for withholding such information: murder. Meanwhile, in the abandoned lands, farm animals and family pets that didn’t starve to death were scavenging through homes, fields, and lawns, becoming feral.
The story of Namie was only the start of business and government, of TEPCO and Tokyo, withholding information from the public. Two months after the crisis was resolved, government inspectors admitted that they had detected tellurium-132—a signature by-product of a reactor meltdown—the day after the tsunami. They had publicly raised and lowered the radiation levels considered safe for schools—as seen with Chernobyl, kids and emergency workers are the hardest-hit victims of nuclear power disasters—causing mayhem for parents. In late March, 45 percent of 1,080 children in the surrounding areas tested positive for thyroid exposure to radiation, but the government claimed these readings were so low there was nothing to worry about. Even 150 miles to the south in the heart of Tokyo, however, radiation was measured at twenty times normal.
In the face of TEPCO’s and the Japanese government’s anodyne public announcements, the hibakusha—Hiroshima’s and Nagasaki’s nuclear-attack survivors—came forward, begging the authorities for “more sense of crisis.” Prime Minister Kan then called the devastation the worst event in Japan’s history since the end of World War II, and Emperor Akihito felt he needed to give his first televised address, using a courtly language few could understand, offering “heartfelt hope that the people will continue to work hand in hand, treating each other with compassion, in order to overcome these trying times.” His appearance was so extraordinary that it was compared to the sole broadcast given by his father, Hirohito, announcing in 1945 that senso owari, “the war is over,” and begging the Yamato people to “endure the unendurable, bear the unbearable.”
Three reactors were now on the cliff of simultaneous meltdown. In Washington, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission believed Daiichi was so out of control that it ran a computer simulation on “the popcorn scenario.” If the Japanese were so overwhelmed by radiation exposure they couldn’t get water to the cores, the entire complex could explode in a series of toxic plumes and fuel meltdowns. “One will pop and then another one and then another one and then another one,” one NRC member said. If that happened, Tokyo could be contaminated with clouds of radioactive fallout.
Another hydrogen explosion ripped open a roof, leaving the nuclear waste ponds exposed to the air. Reactor #4’s fire then ignited and exploded, blowing out a twenty-six-foot-wide hole in the wall. Then an eruption broke the inner containment walls of Reactor #2, releasing eight hundred times the highest recommended levels of radiation.
During one conference call with a government liaison and TEPCO’s president, Masataka Shimizu, site manager Masao Yoshida was told not to cool the reactors by spraying them with seawater. The Tokyo executives heard Yoshida repeat this order to his subordinates, but they did not hear him whisper to one employee at the same time that everyone should ignore it. This corporate insubordination, unheard of in hierarchy-obsessed Japan, may have saved Daiichi from becoming a global disaster. Then Shimizu told Prime Minister Kan’s chief cabinet secretary on March 15, “We cannot hold on to the site!” In a moment of sociopathic corporate malfeasance, Tokyo Electric decided to evacuate everyone and desert the fiasco, leaving the region and perhaps the nation to a que sera sera fate. “If they withdrew, six reactors and seven fuel pools would be abandoned,” the prime minister said. “Everything would melt down. Radiation tens of times worse than Chernobyl would be scattered. . . . I could not let [an evacuation] happen. It just wasn’t an option.”
Another government official called site manager Yoshida, to see if he agreed with the boss. Yoshida did not: “We can still hold on, but we need weapons, like a high-pressure water pump.” Kan told the TEPCO president that his corporation had a moral obligation to try everything it could to end the crisis, to fight this battle with every weapon and every strength. The PM insisted that he was ready to give up his own life if need be.
The decision was made that over 750 plant employees would evacuate, with 50 remaining. Kan announced to the people of Japan, “They are ready to die.” These became the legendary Fukushima 50, treated as nuclear samurai, restoring honor to their nation through their selfless, even suicidal, acts, men who to this day deserve the world’s thanks for keeping a horrible tragedy from turning into a global disaster. Even in Japan, though, they are now wholly forgotten.
The fifty were actually part of a group that eventually numbered four hundred who cycled in and out of the plant to avoid being overexposed. A fair percentage were day jobbers
from the Tokyo and Osaka slums, and a number were Japanese gangsters—yakuza. In December 2011, journalist Tomohiko Suzuki revealed the extensive relationship between Japan’s “nuclear mafia” of utilities and government agencies with the real Japanese mafia. The last refuge for members of the “dark empire” is the nuclear industry, as one explained: “When a man has to survive doing something, it’s the nuclear industry; for a woman, it’s the sex industry.” One midlevel yakuza executive was quick to insist, “The accident isn’t our fault. It’s TEPCO’s fault. We’ve always been a necessary evil in the work process. In fact, if some of our men hadn’t stayed to fight the meltdown, the situation would have been much worse. TEPCO employees and the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency inspectors mostly fled; we stood our ground.”
In the wake of 3.11, corporate and government leaders proclaimed, in that time-honored fashion, that they were battling “acts of God.” But both the Japanese government and Tokyo Electric knew perfectly well that putting emergency generators in basements was a poor strategy on an island with a history of major earthquakes.
In December 1999, France’s Blayais nuclear power plant was flooded and its power supply destroyed. This triggered a reassessment of plant design in Europe, and a reworking of emergency electrics. TEPCO and NISA knew this history, but did not apply that lesson to themselves. In 2004, University of Tokyo seismologist Kunihiko Shimazaki warned that Japan’s AEC—the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency—and Tokyo Electric had grossly underestimated the risk of tsunamis at Fukushima. Regulators on the panel immediately dismissed these comments as speculative and categorized them as “pending further research.” In 2008, TEPCO ran a computer simulation predicting a fifteen-meter tsunami wave could breach Daiichi’s sea-storm defenses and render havoc. TEPCO executives decided their own computer’s predictions were fanciful and ignored them. On June 24, 2009, another pair of seismologists appeared before a government committee to explain that Daiichi could be destroyed by tsunami. Even an employee remembered thinking, “I always wondered why you would build a nuclear site this size in an earthquake zone right on the ocean.”
This close association between government and industry in Japan is no coincidence. Called a “culture of complicity” by outsiders, amakudari—“descent from heaven”—means retired government workers are routinely given senior positions at the companies they once regulated, and vice versa. After winning a seat in parliament, one Tokyo Electric vice president demanded the nation’s textbooks delete mentions of the antinuclear protest movements in Europe and the United States.
Even after America’s AEC was split into the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Department of Energy to repair just this kind of inbreeding, the relationship between federal agencies and private industry in the United States is nearly as cozy as it is in Japan. “In the year 2002, the [NRC’s] reactor oversight process gave the Davis-Besse plant [directly south of Detroit] the highest marks possible, basically straight A’s, even though it was then discovered to have come closest to an accident since the Three Mile Island accident in 1979,” nuclear expert David Lochbaum said. “So, anytime a system can’t distinguish the best from the worst, there’s still some work left to be done on it.” A 2011 report from the Union of Concerned Scientists detailed fourteen “near-miss” safety or security incidents from the prior two years, noting a number of these where both the US utility and the American government knew about safety violations and did nothing.
Like Marie Curie using her husband Pierre’s quivering gold leaf inside a vacuum bulb to sense the presence of radiance, a plant disaster means that no one can see, directly, what is going on. The trouble can only be deduced remotely from various instruments, controllers, alarms, and dosimeters. Since the quake and the tsunami had destroyed nearly all of Fukushima’s monitoring equipment, in many ways its employees were now deaf and blind. Since all of the government nuclear agency’s on-site inspectors had fled, no one was left who could evaluate the toxicity and advise the workers on protective gear or time limitations in different areas of the site. So when it came to exposure, they were essentially naked.
Reactor #2’s control room was, by March 15, so infectious—a thousand times normal, with 170 people exposed and 22 with symptoms of radiation sickness—that no one could work in it for any length of time. Under the current Japanese regulations covering nuclear employees’ radiation-exposure limits, Daiichi was about to run out of staff. Luckily, the country’s Ministry of Health amended the limit from 100 millisieverts, over five years, to 250. In America, that limit is 50.
Each of the Fukushima 50 knew that if their dosimeters registered more than 50 millisieverts over a year, they would be banned from working in the nuclear industry, so they took off their monitors to avoid being made unemployable. Others took off their masks in the radiation-drenched buildings to light up smokes. Otherwise, they worked in blue protective suits and respirators at grueling schedules. Their breakfast was emergency crackers and vegetable juice; dinner, instant rice and a can of mackerel; no lunch. In two days they ran out of protective bootees, and had to make do with plastic bags and masking tape. Since there was no plumbing, there was no way to wash; only hands could be cleaned with an alcohol spray. They couldn’t contact their families since phone lines and cell towers were down. Besides covering the plant in wreckage, the tsunami dropped hundreds of fish that died all over the grounds, and hungry seabirds were swooping in to feed. The workers slept wherever they could find room in a “clean” building with their assigned blanket. TEPCO employee Emiko Ueno: “My town is gone. My parents are still missing. I still cannot get in the area because of the evacuation order. I still have to work in such a mental state. This is my limit.”
The continuing explosions; the fires erupting everywhere; the tsunami-scattered debris; the odor of dead sea life, of burning fuel rods, of overworked and fearful and unwashed men. In all the Cold War fantasies about how the world will end in nuclear holocaust, no one imagined the details of a power plant run amok, an industrial utility collapsing in atomic chaos. But to those in the middle of Daiichi in its worst hours, it appeared that these were the Last Days. “In the control room, people were saying we were finished,” one employee remembered. “They were saying it quietly, but they were saying it. We felt we had to flee. This was the end.”
As TEPCO employees work to this day under strict nondisclosure contracts, most of the public information about the Fukushima 50 comes from outsiders caught up in the crisis. Koichi Nakagawa was a subcontractor doing routine maintenance and inspections at the plant on March 11 and could easily have been evacuated at the very beginning; when Japanese TV broadcast the first explosion, Nakagawa’s boss called him and demanded, “What the hell are you doing? Get out of the place!” But Nakagawa stayed, thinking he might lose his job in a cutback: “I couldn’t say no to [TEPCO] because they’d give my company work in the future.” While almost every Tokyo Electric employee walked the grounds in protective gear, Nakagawa was still in his standard-issue cotton uniform. After the explosion in Reactor #2, everyone started talking about how all six reactors might blow up, and that all of them would die. Nakagawa began wondering if he could escape without being noticed: “My mind went blank. I thought I was toast. I couldn’t take it anymore.”
Nakagawa slipped out of the plant and drove home. But the town where he lived was deserted, and he didn’t have enough gas to drive to where everyone had been evacuated. A little food was left in the house, and there was electricity, at least. Then his boss called, saying he’d pay ten times Nakagawa’s regular salary if he returned to Daiichi. He called his TEPCO friends, and they agreed to come and pick him up: “I thought about changing jobs, but it isn’t easy. We have no other industry but the power plant, and I have a family to feed. I had no other choice.”
On the night of March 15, firefighters, soldiers, and TEPCO employees met at J-Village, a sports training facility twelve miles south of Daiichi. Since the power was out there as well, they arranged a dozen
or so trucks into a circle and turned on the headlights. The meeting did not go well. Everyone had a different and conflicting plan on how to solve the disaster. Phone service had still not been restored, so TEPCO executives in Tokyo could not advise on or consent to any decision anyway. One TEPCO manager admitted, “There were so many ideas, the meeting turned into a panic. There were serious arguments between the various sections about whether to go, how to use electrical lines, which facilities to use, and so on.”
Nuclear Regulatory Commission chair Gregory Jaczko warned the US Congress on March 16 that little or no water remained in #4’s waste-suppression pool. TEPCO spokesman Hajime Motojuku insisted, “We can’t get inside to check, but we’ve been carefully watching the building’s environs, and there has not been any particular problem.” In fact, if a worker was sent in to repair the damaged plumbing and spent more than sixteen seconds standing next to the pool, he would be dosed enough to die. The Japanese did admit that the containment shells of Reactors 2 and 3 had cracked, releasing radioactive vapors. TEPCO then made an especially unnerving announcement that it had found radiation at 10 million times normal, then retracted that, saying it was actually a mere one hundred thousand times normal. Global security scientist Edwin Lyman: “If you can’t make accurate measurements, if you ignore alarms . . . it’s a sign of chaos.”
Later that day, the NRC’s computer program RASCAL finished diagramming the Japanese plumes of radiation. RASCAL said that the danger zone had a fifty-mile radius—about the size of Chicago—terrible news, but if there were no more explosions and if the core temperatures could be controlled, at least Tokyo would not have to be evacuated. The US Energy Department’s team of atomic forensics deduced that 70 percent of one core and 33 percent of a second had melted.