Читать книгу Meltdown - Yoichi Funabashi - Страница 35

Sometime after eight a.m. on March 13, Yoshida raised a new problem in the videoconference.

“There’s talk of the steam coming out of the Unit 1 fuel pool … The state of the pool’s looking bad, so I want to take steps, but since there’s no water source, no ideas are coming to mind.”

“We can’t get close to it. So, it might seem a bit extreme … a helicopter or something injecting from above.”

A TEPCO official at the offsite center broke in.

“I think the situation’s the same for the other plants as what was just said about the 1F1 (Fukushima Daiichi Unit 1) pool. You know, we’re still unable to cool. Isn’t there some way of getting something into the remaining plants? Don’t we have to start thinking outside the box?”

Offsite center: “Toss in some ice.”

“Chuck in something, ice or dry ice.”

“All you can do is chuck in ice, at least for the plant inside the building.”

Yoshida: “It’s just that … the radiation is so high in Unit 3 we can’t get close and carry ice to it.”

Offsite center: “Is the radiation that high at Unit 3?”

Head Office: “How about putting ice in where the radiation isn’t high? You have to start thinking in parallel.”

Yoshida: “Okay, so that’s it, we’ll arrange for some ice. Ice, arrange it.”

After Yoshida had agreed, Managing Director Akio Komori gave the directive. “Head Office Procurement Team. We may need to get hold of some ice. I don’t know if we need one or two tons, but get as much as you can. For the moment, start making arrangements.”²⁶

TEPCO decided to add dropping ice into the Unit 1 fuel pool to its list of requests for the Kantei, and to have CEO Masataka Shimizu deliver the requests when he visited the Kantei that day.²⁷

That morning, TEPCO made a sudden phone call to Bushu Seihyo, an ice manufacturer in Kumagaya, Saitama Prefecture, and ordered some ice. “We need ice, two tons or however much you can give us.”

Makoto Shiozaki, manager of the Ice Division at Bushu Seihyo, who took the call, immediately figured it out—“They want it to cool the reactors!”—but didn’t ask any unnecessary questions, and the TEPCO side didn’t say anything more.

That afternoon, a truck rushed in from a company called TEPCO Logistics, and loaded 135 kilograms of ice blocks. A little while later, two trucks turned up, this time with several staff from TEPCO’s Kumagaya office.

They were told they couldn’t load 135 kilograms onto a helicopter. So they packed three four-kilogram blocks into crates and loaded a hundred or so into the trucks. They then took the ice to the airfield in Okegawa.

From there, pilots from Shin Nippon Helicopters, one of TEPCO’s associate companies, loaded it into the bellies of two helicopters, a small one and a large one, and flew to the Fukushima nuclear plant from there.

The designated destination was the sports ground of Fukushima Daini rather than Fukushima Daiichi. The pilots whispered along the lines, “I wonder if the sports field at Daiichi is already contaminated and can’t be used?”

After they landed at the sports ground, however, no one from TEPCO met them. Not seeing what else they could do, the pilot and the mechanic unloaded, one by one, the hundred-odd crates of ice.

There was already a huge chunk of thick ice on the ground. It looked to be about the same amount of ice as they had brought in. It was covered in some places, but mostly open to the elements.

The pilot thought suspiciously, This must have been transported by land. How can they have brought in all this ice, with the gas shortage?

The pilot flew wearing a raincoat over his jacket. He was not issued any radiation protective gear by his company. Thinking it might come in useful, he had bought some before the flight, but it had ripped on the way.

Shin Nippon Helicopters was receiving further requests from TEPCO.

“Can’t you drop it from the air?”

“Won’t you take some shots of the reactors from the air?”

Shin Nippon Helicopters refused both requests.

TEPCO seemed to be advancing its ice strategy in secret. It looked like they had chosen a distant airfield on purpose.

Were they afraid residents would panic if it leaked out that they were thinking of putting ice in to cool the reactors?

The pilots never found out what happened to the ice in question.

Inside TEPCO, they were considering dropping ice from the air into the spent-fuel pool of Unit 1, wondering, moreover, whether the drop could be “outsourced” to Shin Nippon Helicopters. It was to this end that they arranged to have a total of 3.5 tons of ice flown in, including the ice procured from Bushu Seihyo.

In the evening, however, doubts were voiced about the ice-drop strategy.

4:30 P.M. ON MARCH 13. Videoconference.

Head Office: “What with developments at Unit 1 and here as well as the extremely high radiation, we need to discuss carefully whether we can really do this work at night, and if not at night, when can we do it.”

Yoshida: “Even if we start getting it ready right now, it’s going to be pitch-black, right? So, it’s going to be impossible today. But as to whether we do it tomorrow, we’re worried now about the plant next door as well as the radiation issue, so we’re hesitant about the optimal timing.”

Fukushima Daiichi: “Bearing in mind the impact, it’s really just a drop in the bucket.”²⁸

There was 990 tons of water in the spent-fuel pool at Unit 1. They were aware that the effect of dropping 3.5 tons of ice from helicopters would be minimal.

There was a second order from TEPCO to Bushu Seihyo on March 14. It was transported by road to Fukushima, but Shiozaki later heard that it had melted.

TEPCO had arranged for a total of fifty or sixty tons of ice that day from three ice-making plants in Saitama, Gunma, and Tochigi Prefectures. But the water drop strategy had melted away before it could be implemented.²⁹