Читать книгу Meltdown - Yoichi Funabashi - Страница 31

After five p.m. on March 11, Yoshida instructed: “Look into water injection methods for the nuclear reactors using fire extinguishing lines and/or fire engines” for Units 1 and 2. The first referred to a firefighting line using a diesel-driven fire pump. The other referred to injecting water into the nuclear reactor using fire engines.

After the accident at Kashiwazaki-Kariwa in 2007, TEPCO was keenly aware of the need for alternative water injection using fire engines at times of disaster. They had, therefore, designed fire-extinguishing equipment inside the reactor, which could be used even for nuclear reactor cooling in emergencies via appropriately extended tips and deployed fire engines at every nuclear power plant, three being allocated to the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant.

However, due to the tsunami, the fire pumps in the turbine building could hardly be used. Consequently, there was no choice but to inject water from fire engines outside into the water inlet on the outer wall of the turbine building, to cool the nuclear reactor.

Staff checked the status of the reactor building twice, and were able to ascertain that the fire extinguishing pump in the basement pump room was working. All they had to do now was to get water in from outside.

6:30 P.M. The team of Ikuo Izawa, duty manager of Fukushima Daiichi’s Central Control Room, started work on creating a line to put water from the pump into the reactor. There was a containment vessel outside the reactor and a shielding concrete wall of about two meters on the outer side of the containment vessel. Several pipes ran through it. They had to build a line connecting the fire-extinguishing pump to the piping. To that end, there were five valves that had to be opened. And they had to be opened by hand.

It was reported at around eight p.m. that the valves were open. An hour later, after nine p.m., the radiation dose at Unit 1 started rising. At 11:05 p.m., Yoshida declared Unit 1 (RB) “off limits.” However, the water injection line through the fire pump had barely been secured just prior to that.¹

Laying down a water injection line and injecting water into the reactor, however, were quite different operations. TEPCO was to learn immediately how challenging a task pumping water in was.

On the frontline at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, it was the Disaster Prevention Group that was responsible for that. One of them was forty-nine-year-old Mari Sato. During the crisis, Sato would do all kinds of work, including emergency broadcasting, organizing workers’ meals, refueling fuel vehicles, and so on.

Sato was born in Fukushima City. Originally, she had wanted to be a kindergarten teacher, but could not find a job and somehow ended up working at TEPCO’s Hirono Thermal Power Station. It was 1981. She worked there for nearly twenty years, and later was transferred to Fukushima Daini and then Fukushima Daiichi.

She had a son and daughter in college. Her husband came back to Hirono after retiring, so they built a house there, where they lived together. The children had just been home on their spring break.

Let us rewind the clock a little.

When the earthquake occurred, Sato was on the second floor of the office building. The shaking from the earthquake sent her mobile phone flying off the gray steel desk. She tried to find it, but the tremor was so strong she was unable to get to her feet quickly. It must have slipped into a crack somewhere. She couldn’t see it.

Sato was in charge of disaster prevention at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. She had to make an in-house announcement. There was no time to look for her phone. She went to the broadcasting equipment on the same second floor, in a stagger among the shaking. The broadcasting equipment had already been disconnected and was out of use. All of the ceiling panels had fallen down and were completely white with dust. The tremors were still intense and the whiteboards fell down one after another.

With a megaphone in hand, she went around the inside of the office building and called out the evacuation assembly point. Then she left the courtyard, did a roll call for the members of each team, and evacuated close to a thousand employees to the front of the office building.

Gray clouds hung low. Even at midday, the temperature didn’t reach 10 degrees Celsius. Although it was finally nearing spring, it was as chilly as if it had reverted to winter.

After that, Sato went to the Emergency Response Center on the second floor of the Anti-Seismic Building. Approximately 350 personnel who were a part of the emergency setup had gathered. Everyone there was wearing different-colored bibs with the name of their section. Sato put on the Disaster Prevention Group’s bib.

What were they to do with the remaining nearly seven hundred temporary workers and workers from affiliated companies? Sato asked Site Superintendent Yoshida, “What shall we do? Should I let them in?”

“Let them in.”

Both the first and second floors of the Anti-Seismic Building were flooded with people.

TEPCO had two fire engines at Fukushima Daiichi and had a firefighting team organized into three groups of nine people on standby around the clock.

Takeyuki Inagaki, head of the recovery team, was in charge. Including Hiroyuki Ogawa, there were four chiefs of the firefighting teams under Inagaki. Then came Sato’s boss, the group manager; then Sato. Workers from each department were concurrently registered as firefighters. However, since they all had full-time jobs, they were “kind of a voluntary force,” according to Ogawa.

Despite having drilled water discharge using fire hydrants, the firefighters did not have the ability or technical knowledge to operate fire engines, start the fire pumps, and inject water by themselves—nor did they have any training. As a matter of fact, firefighting activity at the Fukushima Daiichi premises was outsourced to Nanmei Kosan, a TEPCO subcontractor, and the Japan Nuclear Security System (JNSS), who were professional firefighters.

Nanmei Kosan had an office near the main gate of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. It had two fire engines and was organized into fire brigades of three teams with nine people on a twenty-four-hour system. Nevertheless, the firefighting activities of these companies were premised on ordinary fires. It was not stipulated in their contracts that they were to conduct alternative water injection operations for the nuclear reactors in the event of a natural disaster.

The tsunami and earthquake warnings all rang constantly even after the first big shake. Each time, the fire brigade went outside and checked the situation at various sites.

“Hey, someone’s up on the roof!”

They rescued workers left behind on the roof of the building.

“What’s that, a fire?”

It looked like smoke was rising, but on closer inspection, a fire hydrant was broken and water was spurting out. Had a small oil tank broken down? There was a very strong smell of oil spreading on the road.

When the fire brigade came back, their boots were covered in mud. Oil was stuck to them. In the evening, the sky suddenly grew dark. Everything was enveloped in a heavy, gray cloud. Driving snow started to fall.

At two a.m. on March 12, the station ERC asked Nanmei Kosan employees, who were standing by, if they “could check the filling port on the Unit 1 turbine building and pump water in from the fire engines?” The Nanmei Kosan people complied.

The TEPCO firefighters had made the first-floor overnight duty room into a “firefighting zone.” Workers from Nanmei Kosan were also gathered there. But where was the water supply inlet on the Unit 1 turbine building? Nanmei Kosan asked the question, but the ERC didn’t know its location. Someone from the power generation team took the Nanmei Kosan workers and went to the site, but they couldn’t find the water inlet. In that area, there was a pile of rubble from the tsunami, and it couldn’t be approached easily. Therefore, they returned to the Anti-Seismic Building, once again confirmed the position on the plans, went to the work site with workers who knew the place, and found the water inlet.

However, the task of injecting water by fire engines was not covered by TEPCO’s outsourcing contract, as mentioned above. Consequently, asking them to do this was equivalent to “fraudulent outsourcing.”

Nanmei Kosan showed its disapproval. There was something they just could not understand. The TEPCO firefighters, who, by rights, should have been taking the initiative, were not going out into the field, but were holed up in the Anti-Seismic Building and telling them to do this and that. What was that all about?

Eventually, even when they found the filling port, the TEPCO fire brigade refused to go with them, saying they didn’t know where the water inlet was, and although, in the end, someone from the power generation team accompanied them, he wasn’t very useful. Still, Sato and the others somehow managed to persuade the reluctant Nanmei Kosan workers.

At four a.m. on March 12, employees from Nanmei Kosan started using fire engines to inject water into the nuclear reactor. However, around 4:20 a.m., the radiation dose near the turbine building of Unit 1 spiked.

“The dose has increased so much, it’s impossible.”

Nanmei Kosan suspended the water injection operation, and the staff carrying out the work returned to the Anti-Seismic Building. Nanmei Kosan had strict dose controls in place so that employees did not exceed 20 millisieverts per year or 100 millisieverts over five years. Now, just going to the work site once meant a dose of 10–20 millisieverts. They said repeatedly, “Headquarters has told us strictly not to go to the site several times, so we can’t go.”

There was still that other thing continuing to gnaw at their hearts. Why was it not TEPCO employees but Nanmei Kosan employees who had to go out, risking death from a high radiation dose?

“We can’t pump in water from the fire engines anymore.”

But Sato and the others were desperate, too.

“No, this time our firefighters will go with you. Can’t you go together with them? Please.”

“We’ll take over if you teach us how the fire engine’s pumps uptake water and the method to adjust the pressure of the water supply.”

“We’re begging you. You can stay behind in the car, and we’ll go outside. Can’t you give us someone, just one person will do, to give instructions?”

In the end, the Nanmei Kosan side gave in. At around five a.m., a total of four people—Hiroyuki Ogawa, head of the TEPCO firefighters; two other TEPCO staff members; and one Nanmei Kosan worker—headed toward the Unit 1 Turbine Building in a fire engine.

They finally managed to get the pumping fully operational by 5:46 a.m. More than fourteen hours had passed since the loss of AC power.²

At 3:36 p.m. on March 12, the Unit 1 building exploded. Four TEPCO employees and two Nanmei Kosan workers involved in the water injection were injured. Hiroyuki Ogawa also broke his left hand and was forced to temporarily step aside.

By this time, every department had called back its registered firefighters, one by one, until there were almost no firefighters left. Sato’s boss had been unable to gather personnel for water pumping operations. He said, almost apologetically, to Sato and one other person who happened to be there just at that time, “So, will you work with me?” Sato had no choice but to answer, “You’re saying ‘work with me’ when there’s just us three here! There’s nothing else I can do but try.”

The most urgent task at the time was refueling the fire engine. They had the fire engines hooked up for the water injection, but the fire engines’ fuel had run out time and time again. Nanmei Kosan refused to do the job. The fact that some of their workers had been injured in the Unit 1 explosion was making people in the field nervous. Nanmei Kosan’s CEO stubbornly refused to give the go-ahead.

“Nope, we can’t go. Our CEO is also saying no.”

Radiation levels had increased after the explosion at Unit 1. There were noticeably more people wearing Tyvek suits inside the Anti-Seismic Building as well. The doors to the Anti-Seismic Building had been warped by the Unit 1 explosion. They were double doors, normally automatic, with no handles. The automatic switch was turned off, and they were opened and closed manually by radiation management workers.

This is no good. There’s a gaping crack.

After the decision to build an anti-seismic building had been made, upper management had also asked Sato, who was in charge of disaster prevention, if she had any requests for the building.

“I want you to make it bigger, more like a fortress.”

That was what she wrote, but her report was treated with contempt. The official position was, “It has to be built quickly, compact, and at a low cost.”

Late at night on March 13, Sato was begging the Nanmei Kosan chief firefighter and his workers for help. Unit 3 was in a critical state. The refueling work had been delayed and no progress was being made with the water injection. Even Yoshida didn’t hide his anger, saying, “We decided to refuel every few hours.”³

Sato was desperate. At that time, the disaster prevention and safety manager was also coming down from the second floor, and they came together and appealed to the chief firefighter, who was sitting on the floor. When Sato approached the chief, he told her, “Don’t come near me … Sato-san, I’m sorry, but please don’t come here again.”

She knew many of the Nanmei Kosan workers there. However, there were also a few she had never met before. They looked like a kind of backup squad. They surrounded Sato. Their eyes were bloodshot. In the blink of an eye, Sato fell to her knees. On seeing that, the disaster prevention and safety manager also went down on his knees.

Sato was already wearing a Tyvek suit covered in packing tape, as well as a full-face mask. From inside her mask, Sato pleaded.

“Things have reached this state because of our lack of competence. I’m so sorry for making trouble for Nanmei Kosan. I have one favor to ask. Please go with me. I’ll remember how to refuel, so please show me how.”

Sato repeated this, but the chief turned away, saying, “No, we can’t go.”

They were enveloped by silence. Did they stay on their knees for about ten minutes? Nanmei Kosan’s deputy chief firefighter mumbled, “Boss, I’ll go and show them how to do it.”

It was a man Sato had worked with many times before.

Sato took stable iodine, which suddenly made her stomach hurt, and she had to rest for a while. The Tyvek was sticky, and it was hard to move.

After doing refueling work like this for about three hours at several places, Sato and the deputy chief returned to the Anti-Seismic Building. If the refueling wasn’t carried out continuously, water injection operations would be interrupted. They learned it the hard way.

It was the firefighting team that was responsible for water injection, but the water pumping couldn’t be kept up unless refueling took place. Refueling may have been the job of a different team, but now wasn’t the time to say such a thing. Something had to be done quickly …

When she came back to the station, Sato made that appeal to her team manager. His reply was unexpected.

“Sticking your nose in …”

He said it was “sticking your nose in.” It’s a hellish scene, and we have no one. No one would go, even when we begged on our knees. There was only myself to go. How dare he say “sticking your nose in”!

Sato felt like crying, but fought back the tears.⁴