A Job Becomes a Mission
By YUKA HAYASHI
Wall Street Journal reporters revisited some people featured in coverage over the past year, whose lives were upended by the events of last March 11. Here's an update on a nuclear scientist who blew the whistle on the government's handling of the accident.
The nuclear accident in Fukushima turned Toshiso Kosako's life upside down.
The 62-year-old nuclear scientist, accustomed to a quiet academic existence at Tokyo University, found himself trailed by paparazzi, hit by half a dozen death threats and besieged by thousands of phone calls seeking advice on radiation safety (overwhelming his fed-up secretary).
Mr. Kosako became an overnight sensation last April when he resigned as emergency nuclear adviser to then-Prime Minister Naoto Kan to protest Tokyo's handling of the accident. Specifically, he criticized the government's decision to set the limit for children's annual schoolyard exposure at 20 millisieverts.
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"I could not expose my own children to that level of exposure," he said at a press conference, as he wiped tears from his eyes.
Government officials dismissed his criticism as "an individual opinion."
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Toshiso Kosako resigning last April
Mr. Kosako spent the next two months hiding within the walls of his university, working with students. When he re-emerged in public in July, he actively began to raise his profile, attending a number of academic conferences both in Japan and abroad and giving media interviews.
"Until 3/11, I just saw this as my job," said the chatty, bespectacled professor. "Now I have a sense of mission that I need to help a lot more people understand."
He is currently working with the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements, a Bethesda, Md. organization of independent scientists, to establish an international commission of nuclear experts to investigate the Fukushima accident, similar to one that probed the accident at Chernobyl.
Back to Normal for a Fukushima Cleanup Crew
By PHRED DVORAK
Wall Street Journal reporters revisited some people featured in coverage over the past year, whose lives were upended by the events of last March 11. Here's an update on the workers called in during the early days of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster.
When explosions rocked the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant a year ago, Masayuki Sakamoto was one of the first people called in. Although the owner of 35-person construction firm didn't know it at the time, the March 11 earthquake and tsunami had just precipitated meltdowns at three of the plant's reactors.
Mr. Sakamoto spent the next month inside the contaminated plant compound clearing debris, setting up water tanks, and doing other heavy work to help tame the overheating reactors.
He had never dealt with radiation before, and though conditions after the accident were extremely hazardous, he was given very little training on what to do. By June, workers at his company, Hokuriku Koki, were being tested to see how much radiation they'd been exposed to.
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These days, Mr. Sakamoto says life is largely returning to normal for Hokuriko Koki, with most workers back to their regular labors of laying drains for dams and other construction projects. He and his employees stopped working inside Fukushima Daiichi in December, he says, around the time that plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. declared reactor temperatures had fallen to a "cold-shutdown" level, with little radiation being released.
Radiation levels in most areas inside the compound have gone down dramatically since the initial days after the accident, and the dirt-and-rock-moving crews called in for emergency response have been replaced by the kind of specialists and technicians who'd been working at the plant before, says Mr. Sakamoto.
"They probably fled when it was dangerous and used us," he says.
Some five or six of his employees have been working this year inside the 18-mile danger zone around the stricken plant, decontaminatiing roads, houses and rice fields. Rice-field decontamination, Mr. Sakamoto says, largely involves scraping off the top layer of soil and putting it in a bag for storage somewhere. The Japanese government still hasn't come up with a plan for permanent storage and disposal of all the irradiated dirt, rocks and wreckage littering the region.
Mr. Sakamoto says that he and his workers registered relatively low levels of accumulated radiation exposure. He didn't reveal details, but says their levels have been under the 100 millisievert limit the government has set as permissible for nuclear-plant workers.
"We're pretty much all fine," he says.
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