Dogs and Demons_ Tales From the Dark Side of Japan - Kerr [52]
Given that several nuclear bombs' worth of plutonium dust were lost somewhere inside the Tokai plant, there was great public concern over the Tokai fire. Yet Donen's initial report was a shambles, in some places saying, «Radioactive material was released,» and in others, «No radioactive material was released»; claiming that workers had reconfirmed in the morning that the fire was under control, though they had not (managers had pressured the workers to change their stories); misstating the amount of leaked radioactive material, which turned out to be larger than reported by a factor of twenty. Incredibly, on the day of the explosion, sixty-four people, including science and engineering students and foreign trainees, toured the complex, even visiting one building only a hundred meters from the site of the fire – and nobody ever informed them of the accident.
Several weeks later, Donen revealed that it waited thirty hours before reporting a leak of radioactive tritium at an advanced thermal reactor, Fugen. This was an improvement, though, because in eleven cases of tritium leaks during the previous two and a half years, Donen had made no reports at all. Reform, however, was on the way: Donen was «disbanded» and renamed Genden in May 1998, supposedly to appease an angry public. Today, under this new name, the nuclear agency continues to operate with the same staff, offices, and philosophy as before.
Nor is it only government agencies such as Donen-Genden that are falling behind in nuclear safety. The same problems beset private industry. The troubles at the Tokai plant came to a head at 10:35 a.m. on September 30, 1999, when employees at a fuel-processing plant managed by JCO, a private contractor, dumped so much uranium into a settling basin that it reached critical mass and exploded into uncontrolled nuclear fission. It was Japan's worst nuclear accident ever – the world's worst since Chernobyl – resulting in the sequestration of tens of thousands of people living in the area near the plant. The explosion was a tragedy for forty-nine workers who were exposed to radiation (three of them critically) but at the same time a comedy of errors, misinformation, and mistakes. It turned out that Tokai's nuclear plant had not repaired its safety equipment for more than seventeen years. The workers used a secret manual prepared by JCO's managers that bypassed safety regulations in several critical areas: essentially, material that workers should have disposed of via dissolution cylinders and pumps was carried out manually with a bucket.
Measures to deal with the accident could be described by no other word than primitive. Firefighters rushed to the scene after the explosion was reported, but since they had not been told that a nuclear accident had occurred they did not bring along protective suits, although their fire station had them – and they were all contaminated with radiation. In the early hours, no local hospital could be found to handle the victims even though Tokai has fifteen nuclear facilities. There was no neutron measurer in the entire city, so prefectural officials had to call in an outside agency to provide one; measurements were finally made at 5 p.m., nearly seven hours after the disaster. Those measurements showed levels of 4.5 millisieverts of neutrons per hour, when the limit for safe exposure is 1 millisievert per year, and from this officials realized for the first time that a fission reaction was still going on! Many other measurements, such as for isotope iodine 131, weren't made until as many as five days later.
The accident at Tokai came