Pensioners to aid nuclear plant clean-up on worker shortage
By Shigeru Sato and Yuji Okada
23 June 2011
Yasuteru Yamada, a 72-year-old former anti-nuclear activist, will lead a band of pensioners to the Fukushima Dai-Ichi plant early next month to help clean up the site of Japan’s worst atomic disaster since World War II. Yamada, a retired Sumitomo Metal Industries Ltd. (5405) plant engineer, is waiting for Tokyo Electric Power Co. to allow his volunteer “Skilled Veterans Corps” to carry out preliminary inspections at the plant after the government welcomed the move. Almost four months after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami triggered the crisis by damaging the Dai-Ichi plant, 3,514 workers involved in the clean-up have been exposed to radiation, including nine whose readings breached the annual limit of 250 millisieverts for a nuclear plant worker. Tepco said it had 1,044 workers at the plant as of June 19, about half the number a month earlier. “I’m not on a suicide mission,” said Yamada, a 1962 graduate of Tokyo University. “I am going to try my best to protect myself and come back alive.” Tepco is struggling to hire workers at the crippled plant that has spewed radiation across at least 600 square kilometers (230 square miles) in northeastern Japan. The Tokyo-based company, which has about 3,100 employees in its nuclear division, is considering ways to make the best use of its workers, said Ai Tanaka, a company spokeswoman, without elaborating. “People who are willing to sacrifice their daily lives to help the nation resolve these problems are invaluable,” Goshi Hosono, special advisor to Prime Minister Naoto Kan, said in a news briefing in Tokyo today. “First we’ll have to check on their health status, as people at an advanced age working in that kind of environment could fall ill.” […]
