Thursday, March 17, 2011
THEY are known as the Fukushima 50, the workers who stayed behind at the crippled Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant in order to prevent a meltdown in Japan.
They are the heroes risking their lives on the front line of Japan’s nuclear crisis — and are being watched by a grateful and anxious nation.
The workers are tasked with keeping cooling water flowing into the six reactors at the Fukushima Unit 1 plant.
Explosions and a fire at the plant, 250 kilometres northeast of Tokyo, have unleashed dangerous levels of radiation, forcing the operator to pull out hundreds of workers and leaving just a few dozen behind.
The staff were briefly evacuated yesterday after smoke rose above the plant and radiation levels spiked, but then were allowed to return to continue their work — amid jitters about eventual widespread contamination.
"The people working at these plants are fighting without running away," Michiko Otsuki, an employee at the separate Unit 2 plant who also has been evacuated, wrote in a post on Japanese social networking site Mixi.
"Now I can only pray for the safety of everyone... Please don’t forget that there are people who are working to protect everyone’s lives in exchange for their own lives."
Prime Minister Naoto Kan has saluted the efforts and courage of the workers employed by embattled plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) — as his chief spokesman Yukio Edano confirmed their health was at risk.
"Those with TEPCO and related entities are working to pour water, making their best effort even at this moment, without even thinking twice about the danger," Mr Kan said.
Tens of thousands of residents have already been evacuated from within a radius of 20km of the 40-year-old plant, and Mr Kan urged people living within 10km of the zone to stay indoors.
David Brenner, the director of radiological research at Columbia Service, said that given the radiation levels detected at the troubled facility, the workers were at "significant risk".
"In many ways they are already heroes... (they) are going to be suffering very high radiation exposures," Mr Brenner said.
Mr Edano said the level was stable near the plant’s front gate, after spiking to dangerous levels earlier that day and the day before.
But not everyone is singing the praises of the difficult mission.
The Yomiuri Shimbun reported that Japan’s defence ministry had hit out at the nuclear safety agency and TEPCO after some of its troops were injured and possibly exposed to radiation.
They had been deployed at the plant’s reactor number three when an explosion blew off the outer structure housing the reactor container.
"They said it was safe, which we believed, and we worked there," a senior ministry official was quoted as saying.
"We know about protection from radiation, but we are not specialised in the structure of a nuclear reactor," he said.
"When they say it’s safe, we just trust them, even if we feel a bit uneasy."
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