Japan quake: Heroes will die to stop nuclear meltdown
Technicians risking their lives to save Japan from a nuclear catastrophe insisted last night: ‘We are not afraid to die.’
The team – dubbed the Fukushima 50 – have been fighting to prevent a possible meltdown at the Fukushima power plant since Friday’s earthquake and the tsunami that followed it.
One of the workers yesterday told a friend he did not fear death because ‘that was his job’.
The experts were continuing in their work ‘without even thinking twice about the dangers’, said Japan’s prime minister Naoto Kan.
The team has already been exposed to high levels of radiation. Yesterday, the legal limit for exposure was raised from 100 millisieverts to 250 – five times what US nuclear technicians can be legally subjected to.
The group’s efforts were praised by Keiichi Nakagawa, from University of Tokyo Hospital’s radiology department, who said: ‘I don’t know any other way to say it but this is like suicide fighters in a war.’
The Tokyo Electric Power technicians have been striving to cool overheating reactors and storage pools.
Reports suggest there may be as many as 180 workers but they have been given their name because they operate in shifts of 50 at a time.
Two have been missing for two days following the fire at No.4 reactor.
‘These are good guys,’ said Andriy Chudinov, one of the first men to enter the Chernobyl plant following the disaster there in 1986.
‘They have had it even worse than we did. They had a tsunami first and now there are several reactors with problems. That’s a nightmare for any atomic worker.’
The plant has seen three explosions and two fires since the earthquake.
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Why have they not sent the Tokyo harbour fire boat to the site?
It is capable of pumping 1000's of litres of water and is only a few hundred kilometers away and can be there in 24 hours.
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