The Fukushima Senior Volunteers
The Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant was a disaster born of another disaster. It was made worse by a prior failure to take the necessary safety precautions in the face of foreseeable events by the plant operator, the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO). It was the second worst nuclear accident in history, surpassed only by Chernobyl. Although there were no immediate radiation exposure deaths, the expected number of deaths from cancer caused by radiation exposure in the incident is more than 600, and possibly much more. The evacuation from the area resulted in an estimated 1,600 deaths, mostly among the elderly who were deprived of immediate care and medications during the evacuation.
It began with the Tohoku earthquake of March 11, 2011, which caused the plant’s operating reactors to shut down automatically as designed. Backup diesel generators began providing power to the plant, which went offline, no longer providing power to TEPCO customers. Then the plant was hit by the nearly 50 foot tsunami triggered by the earthquake. The wall of water shut down the diesel generators, the cooling pumps lost power and the reactor cores in several of the vessels began to melt down. Both sea water and the atmosphere absorbed significant amounts of contamination.
Initially both TEPCO and the Japanese government tried to report the situation as being far less of a disaster than it was, issuing false reports of the damage and underestimating the amount of radiation released. They denied that there was damage to any of the cores in the plant and later, once international monitoring reported the much higher radiation levels they were detecting, denied that any of the cores had experienced a meltdown. Workers attempting to control the damage and initiate a recovery were working under extremely high radiation.
As the truth of the extent of the disaster and the dangers of working in the plant and its environs became known, a group of volunteers emerged, offering to take the place of the workers in the plant. These men were all engineers, technicians, and specialists, trained in the plant’s operation, but retired. They offered to take the place of the younger men because they were less likely to have their lives adversely affected by the effects of radiation. How many actually volunteered is unknown, but it was well over 200 and possibly many more. None were suicidal, but they knew the risks and when TEPCO, tired of bad publicity, turned them down they changed tactics.
The Fukushima senior volunteers argued that cells of the body divide more slowly in the elderly than they do in younger people, making them less susceptible to radiation damage. The press labeled the volunteers the “suicide squad” and some called them kamikazes. The negative connotations caused both TEPCO and the Japanese government to reject their offer. They then asked the US government to put pressure on Japan to allow them to replace the younger men at work and at risk in the plant. As of 2018, some are still pressuring the government in Japan to allow them to assume the risk being borne by a younger generation.