Читать книгу Meltdown - Yoichi Funabashi - Страница 12

Masao Yoshida (age 56) was in his ninth month as site superintendent at Fukushima Daiichi NPS. A graduate of mechanical physics at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, he had gone on to graduate school in nuclear power engineering at the same institution, and joined TEPCO in 1980. According to an old acquaintance, Yoshida had also been offered a position as a senior engineer by the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI), but had chosen TEPCO.⁴²

He had been transferred many times between the nuclear power stations at Fukushima Daiichi, Fukushima Daini, Kashiwazaki, and the Nuclear Energy Division at Head Office. He got married when working at Fukushima Daini NPS. Hamadori, the easternmost part of Fukushima Prefecture, was like a second home to him.

At 184 cm, Yoshida was tall for a Japanese. The first impression Charles Casto, the head of Japanese site support operations sent by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), had of Yoshida was his height. “A slender gentleman” was his impression.

Getting Yoshida’s permission, Casto took a commemorative photo. Yoshida was holding a bag of rice and a bottle of water. Yoshida told Casto, “This is enough for a meal.”⁴³

They were on the second floor of the Anti-Seismic Building. During the crisis, there was a round-the-clock video link with the emergency response team at Head Office. From the perspective of the Head Office video screen, Yoshida sat plumb in the middle-left seat at the round table, from morning till night and sometimes into the wee hours of the morning. He ran operations from there.

The Anti-Seismic Building had been newly built the previous year as a base for accident response. Based on the damage experienced from the 2007 Chuetsu earthquake, it was a robust design, built to withstand earthquakes of seismic intensity levels of 7 on the Japanese scale. The construction workers bragged, “It won’t budge even if you fire missiles into it.”⁴⁴

The building had its own gas turbine generator, a videoconference system, and filtered ventilators. In order to prevent radioactive contamination, the entrance had double doors. The opening and closing of the doors operated on a round-the-clock system. When one door was opened, the other closed to prevent outside air infiltrating. When entering the Anti-Seismic Building from outside, workers removed their protective clothing in the space between the doors and immediately carried out contamination checks and decontamination.⁴⁵

The Anti-Seismic Building was the command tower where Yoshida and the shift team set up camp. This was the only place onsite where protective masks could be removed.⁴⁶

However, they were operating under atrocious conditions. The worst problem was inadequate filtering of radioactive material. Radioactive material was billowing out of the vents and core welding. Its entrance had been twisted by the force of the hydrogen explosion. Radioactive material was seeping into the Anti-Seismic Building from outside. After the explosion, radiation reached 120 microsieverts (0.12 millisieverts) per hour at one stage. They frantically decontaminated the mud on workers’ boots.⁴⁷

The radiation dose one of the female workers suffered was over the legal limit.⁴⁸ Late at night on March 12, the onsite safety team reported via videoconference link to TEPCO Head Office:

“For those people taking a rest, in order to minimize doses, the northwest corner of this room seems to have the lowest level … The room as a whole is about 70 microsieverts (0.07 millisieverts).”⁴⁹

The occupational physicians at the Anti-Seismic Building had evacuated and were absent from March 11 until March 18. Resident physicians did not start examinations until March 19.⁵⁰

Although they were inundated with problems, the Anti-Seismic Building was irreplaceable. It was here that the squad, composed of TEPCO workers under Yoshida’s leadership, later on known as the “Fukushima 50,” fought on to manage the situation.

After the tsunami warning sounded, Yoshida advised the workers of related companies to evacuate, and again, in the evening, gave the order, “Personnel who are not engaged in work, please evacuate.” The allocation of cars began.⁵¹ The workers of the associate companies began returning to their homes and hometowns.

In case of an emergency, there are twelve teams in place under the command of the director general (nuclear power plant site superintendent) of the power plant. Regardless of whether it was a holiday or midnight, the members of these teams had to gather. There were 406 such personnel. They fought night and day throughout the crisis in the Anti-Seismic Building.⁵²

Yoshida told the deputy director general of defense, Hideo Suzuki, when Suzuki visited the site in the summer of 2011, “All of the glass shattered in the office building, but the Anti-Seismic Building escaped the impact of the earthquake. It was contaminated, but we decontaminated it. The hotline stayed up, and the videoconference link with Head Office continued to work. The Anti-Seistmic Building saved us. We would have been totally lost without it.”⁵³

Kazuma Yokota (age 40), head of the local NISA inspectors at the site, said exactly the same thing:

“It would have been total annihilation without it. I think there would have been six explosions. The quake had put the office building out of operation. If the Emergency Response Center had been in the office building, as before, we wouldn’t have been able to use it. We couldn’t have operated or issued directions. We were able to do that in the Anti-Seismic Building. Everyone says we were saved by the skin of our teeth.”⁵⁴

Unit 1 at Fukushima Daiichi NPS was the first nuclear power station TEPCO had built. Yokota remembers Yoshida saying, “It’s small and problematic, but it’s still a cute little unit.”⁵⁵

On that day, the cute little unit bared its fangs and went on the attack.