Fukushima: Japan’s ‘nuclear samurai’

Fueled by two austere meals of crackers and vegetable juice, the men sleep and work inside the Fukushima Daiichi plant, shielded only by their bulky white protective suits. For 12 hours a day, they desperately race to repair equipment, to keep the nuclear fuel rods covered and cool, and to pump out radioactive water—not far from broken reactors leaking radiation at 100,000 times normal background levels. These stalwart employees of the Tokyo Electric Power Co. are now being called “nuclear samurai” by their admiring countrymen, said Kenji Hall in the Los Angeles Times. In their efforts to prevent a more catastrophic meltdown in the plant’s four damaged reactors, 19 workers have already been exposed to more than 100 millisieverts of radiation since the crisis began, three weeks ago. In the U.S., no nuclear power plant worker can be exposed to more than 50 millisieverts per year. “Crying is useless,” one worker wrote in an e-mail. “If we’re in hell now, all we can do is crawl up toward heaven.”

“I’ve never witnessed heroism like this,” said Fiona McIntosh in the London Sunday Mirror. More than 500 men have cycled in and out of the plant, knowing that they are “the last hope” to keep the reactors’ fuel rods from melting down entirely and leaking radiation into wider and wider swaths of their nation. Last week, two workers spent two hours standing in a pool of water so radioactive that it burned their skin. Plant officials say the men are receiving every possible protection, said Andy Soltis in the New York Post. But the reality, of which these heroes must be only too aware, is that many of them will “likely die from lethal doses of radiation”—soon, or years from now.

“‘Heroism’ is an overused word,” said Joan Smith in the London Independent​.co.uk, but it’s on full display in Fukushima. The sacrifice of the “nuclear samurai” is a “powerful rebuttal of the notion that human beings are motivated by nothing but self-interest.” I’ve seen similar heroism in Iraq, said Matt Schofield in The Kansas City Star. I once asked a 19-year-old Marine there why he willingly stuck his head up over a sand berm, to get a visual on the insurgent forces peppering his mates with .50 caliber fire. “Somebody was going to have to do it,” he said. “Why not me?” You can be sure that’s what the heroes of Fukushima are saying, too.

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