'I am one of the Fukushima fifty'
One of the men who risked their lives to prevent a catastrophe shares his story. They displayed a bravery few can comprehend, yet very little is known about the men who stayed behind to save Japan’s stricken nuclear plant.
It was, recalls Atsufumi Yoshizawa, a suicide mission: volunteering to return to a dangerously radioactive nuclear power plant on the verge of tipping out of control.
As he said goodbye to his colleagues they saluted him, like soldiers in battle. The wartime analogies were hard to avoid: in the international media he was a kamikaze, a samurai or simply one of the heroic Fukushima 50. The descriptions still embarrass him. “I’m not a hero,” he says. “I was just trying to do my job.”
A stoic, soft-spoken man dressed in the blue utility suit of his embattled employer Tokyo Electric Power Co., (Tepco) Mr Yoshizawa still finds it hard to dredge up memories of fighting to stop catastrophe at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. Two years later, debate still rages about responsibility for the planet’s worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl, and its impact. Fish caught near the plant this month contained over 5,000 times safe radiation limits, according to state broadcaster NHK.
A report this week by the World Health Organisation says female infants affected by the worst of the fallout have a 70 per cent higher risk of developing thyroid cancer over their lifetimes, but concluded that overall risks for the rest of the population are “low”. Over 160,000 people have been displaced from their homes near the plant, perhaps permanently, and are fighting for proper compensation. Stress, divorce and suicides and plague the evacuees.
Mr Yoshizawa says he feels “deep responsibility” for the crisis his company triggered. His eyes brim with tears at points in his story, which begins with the magnitude-9 quake less than 100 miles away from the plant under the sea on 11 March 2011. “It was so strong I fell on my hands and knees,” says the 54-year-old engineer. “There was no place to hide.”
The quake’s shockwaves ripped pipes from walls, bounced parked cars like toys and buckled roads at the 864-acre plant. Initially, Mr Yoshizawa believed the Daiichi’s defensive engineering had worked. The instant the tremors struck, control rods were automatically inserted into the plant’s three working reactors to shut down nuclear fission, a process known as “scram.” But the shaking had cut power from the main electricity grid, probably damaged the cooling system to reactor one, and a destructive tsunami over twice as high as the plant’s defences was just 49 minutes away.
Mr Yoshizawa was in charge of reactors five and six, which at the time were shut down for maintenance. He ran to the plant’s seismic isolation building and took his post beside manager Masao Yoshida, who was trying to assess the damage. In the windowless bunker they couldn’t see the tsunami that hit the complex.
