They devised a plan that some have called heroic, others misguided and suicidal. They would enlist a small army of researchers and other skilled workers to come out of retirement to venture inside the radioactive plant and use their expertise to help stabilize its stricken reactors.
In early April, Yamada got on the phone to former colleagues and long-lost contacts. He wrote letters and emails, and joined Twitter to get the word out to 2,500 people. At last count, 400 men and women have signed up for the Skilled Veterans Corps: former electrical engineers, forklift operators, high-altitude and heavy construction workers, military special forces members, two cooks and even a singer who wants to help.
The youngest is 60, the oldest 78.
Many call the volunteers crazy, dismissing them as a Suicide Corps — an over-the-hill gang with a death wish. Others say that the effort should be left up to those who allowed the problem to occur — the plant's operator, the Tokyo Electric Power Co., known as Tepco. The group of skilled veterans, however, insists this is no pie-in-the-sky dream, but a plan based on real science, if not a bit of grim math.
They ask, why risk the health of the younger generation to perform such work in a perilous radioactive environment? Cells reproduce more slowly in the bodies of older people, they reason, so any
cancer caused by absorbed radioactivity would take much longer to form.
Yamada says he'll be dead from something else long before any radiation-caused cancer can kill him.
"Young workers who may reproduce a younger generation and are themselves more susceptible to the effects of radiation should not be engaged in such work," said the retired environmental engineer and consultant. "This job is a call for senior citizens like me."
Volunteer Kazuko Sasaki, 69, said that when she and her husband told their son of their decision to join up, he just shook his head and said, "It's your life."
Friends have questioned her decision. "They say I have absolutely no idea what it's like to get cancer. It's a horrible ordeal. And I tell them that I could get cancer anyway, even if I didn't go."
Yamada and Shiotani, a retired physicist and chemist, felt personally responsible for the catastrophe at the
Fukushima plant.
Even though neither had ever been to Fukushima, it was their generation that had applied its know-how to build the facility in the late 1960s and 1970s. They had also benefited greatly from the nuclear power it generated — which provided the heat and light necessary for their laboratory work, warming the bottles they fed to their children. Many people their age, they say, remain strong advocates for the future of nuclear power in
Japan.
"This nuclear reactor was the brainchild of our generation," Shiotani said. "And we feel it's our job to clean up the mess."
The pair started a website for the Skilled Veterans Corps, which lays out its reasoning. Our generation, "in particular those of us who hailed the slogan that 'Nuclear Power is Safe,' should be the first to join," it says. "This is our duty to the next generation and the one thereafter."
Yamada and Shiotani have met with government and Tepco officials, who have given preliminary approval to enter the facility, which is off-limits to the public, to help design a replacement for the reactor cooling system that was knocked out by the tsunami. No date for entering the plant has yet been set.
In the coming weeks, the volunteers plan their first meeting to map out a strategy, and Yamada and Shiotani are continuing to talk with government and company officials about when they might go inside.
Government and Tepco officials did not respond to interview requests. At this point, officials are trying to enter the stricken reactors amid a hot radioactive environment to assess how to replace the plant's cooling system.
Yamada says he's nobody's hero, just someone trying to preserve youth in a country where roughly one-quarter of the population is 60 and older, making Japan one of the oldest societies in the world.
福島第１原発事故の収束作業を志願している「福島原発行動隊」が７月中旬に現場の状況を視察することが決まった。元技術者らリタイア組約４００人が参加を表明しており、政府や東京電力との打ち合わせ、１カ月程度の訓練を経て、「９月中にも作業に就きたい」という。