Examples in Leadership: Masao Yoshida

山は動かない [武田 信玄]。

Last Tuesday, Jul. 9, 2013, Masao Yoshida passed away. He was 58. He had esophageal cancer.

Until his illness forced him to relinquish his post late in 2011, Masao Yoshida was superintendent of Tokyo Electric Power Company's (TEPCO) Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Station on Japan's northeast coast less than 100 miles north of Tokyo. Yoshida led the power station through the most severe nuclear reactor crisis since the Chernobyl disaster of 1986. Four of six reactors lost all power as a result of the Great Tōhoku Earthquake and Tsunami on Mar. 11, 2011; three were operating. The other was shutdown for inspection, and the fuel had been moved to an adjacent storage pool.

Despite heroic efforts of Yoshida and his crew, the three operating reactors lost cooling, and their fuel melted down. Vast quantities of hydrogen were released into the reactor buildings. Three were devastated by violent explosions. The fourth was spared, because Yoshida's men managed to open a blow out panel. Large quantities of radioactivity spewed into the air for days, contaminating a wide swath of Fukushima Prefecture and adjoining areas. The Government of Japan declared an exclusion zone around the power station. Roughly 160,000 residents had to be evacuated. At present, about half are still not permitted to return home permanently.

Confronted with the earthquake, flooding, aftershocks and the reactors spinning out of control, Yoshida sent most workers home, but convinced a crew of 50 essential operators to stay with him behind in a quake-resistent command center. The men attempted desperately to keep the nuclear fuel in the reactors and in adjacent storage pools cool and covered with water. After fresh water was exhausted, he ordered to use salt water for cooling against the wishes of TEPCO headquarters. The salt would render the reactors irreparable. TEPCO management had clung to the vain hope of being able to operate them again one day.

In a rare interview months later published online Nov. 13, 2011, by The Asahi Shimbun under the headline "Nuke plant director: 'I thought several times that I would die'", Yoshida admitted that he at times believed during the first days of the crisis that he and his men were about to die. He added that he felt that the worst was over only after three months. Despite, Yoshida ascertained that abandoning his post never crossed his mind. The fuel in the two remaining reactors could be cooled with jury-rigged electric pumps, because one emergency diesel generator had survived. Yoshida pointed out that the fuel in these reactors would have inevitably melted as well had the crew retreated from the site.

A power company is no military organization. Operators cannot be ordered to stay on their posts in the face of adversity. They could have walked away anytime. Without doubt, Masao Yoshida's exemplary leadership during the crisis and his sense of duty encouraged the crew to stay with him and fight a dangerously deteriorating situation, risking life and limb, if not cancer years down the road. Their motives were pure. They wanted to prevent the worst. Yoshida mentioned to a reporter that the families of most operators who stayed with him lived in the area.

At the time he had to take sick leave, Yoshida remarked that cleaning up and decommissioning the stricken power station was only at the beginning. The path ahead would lead through uncharted territory strewn with unprecedented challenges. He felt that the task before the operators would be colossal. One nation alone would not be able to cope with it. Rather, a concerted effort of the international community was needed to accomplish the job.

Against Yoshida's advice, little international collaboration has come forth to date. TEPCO, a company versed in selling electric power, has been struggling with containing radioactive effluent and removing radioactive debris. Sprawling tank farms have been erected to store the water contaminated by its use for keeping the reactors cool. Long rows of heavy-clad storage bins contain the collected debris. A decontamination facility has been set up for the stored water, but is not quite operational yet, while radioactivity is increasing in the groundwater near the reactors and is consistently detected in the ocean. Removal of the fuel elements from the storage pools has not even started. Nobody knows precisely where the melted fuel in the reactors resides and how to extract it.

In honor of Masao Yoshida and in memory of his advice, an international not-for-profit foundation should be created bearing his name. The foundation should provide expert advice facilitating the succinct and expeditious cleanup of Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Station, using novel methods and best practices, with the aim that the residents of the villages and towns around the stricken power station can soon return home for good. The world owes this effort to Masao Yoshida and the Fukushima Fifty whose families used to live there.

Reference

• Yuji Okada and Jacob Adelman (07/09/2013) Masao Yoshida, manager of the Fukushima atomic plant, dies at 58. Bloomberg News.

Acknowledgement
I thank simplyinfo.org for keeping me up to date with recent developments at Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Station.

Addenda

• More than 1,000 people attended Masao Yoshida's public funeral in Tokyo yesterday according to Exskf's report with the headline "TEPCO and Citizens Thanked and Bid Farewell to Masao Yoshida, Plant Manager of #Fukushima I Nuke Plant at the Time of the Accident" (08/23/2013).
• Under the headline “The Yoshida Testimony - The Fukushima nuclear accident as told by plant manager Masao Yoshida” The Asahi Shimbun is successively publishing highlights from the Japanese government investigation panel’s debriefing of Masao Yoshida in English. This is the only comprehensive document of the plant superintendent’s personal recollection of the events surrounding the Fukushima nuclear reactor disaster, in which he voices his own opinion on the behavior of a number of decision makers at TEPCO and in the government during the crisis. The debriefing lasted a total of 28 hours. Its transcript fills 400 pages of A4-size paper. The historic importance of this document cannot be overemphasized (07/09/2014).

Fukushima Radiophobia & The Mind

The disastrous nuclear reactor accident at Fukushima Dai-ichi (number one) Nuclear Power Station on the Pacific coast 120 miles north of Tokyo is nearing its second anniversary. As a consequence of the loss of all electric power after the Tohoku-Chihou-Taiheiyou-Oki Earthquake and Tsunami on March 11, 2011, nuclear fuel melted down in three of the station's six reactors.

Aerial view of Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station on March 24, 2011, after hydrogen explosions devastated the upper floors of the reactor buildings of Units 1 (background), 3 and 4 (foreground) in the wake of the March 11 earthquake and tsunami. Unit 4 was offline for inspection. TEPCO believes that hydrogen seeped into its building from Unit 3 via standby gas treatment system piping. The building of Unit 2 lost a blowout panel on the eastern side and was spared (courtesy cryptome.org).

Destructive hydrogen explosions severely damaged the facilities. The amounts of radioactivity released into the environment has been surpassed only by the Chernobyl reactor accident of 1986. Residents near the plant were exposed to radioactive fallout while evacuating the area. The immediate surroundings of the power station and the region affected by the plume of airborne radioactivity remain highly contaminated today. Roughly 80,000 residents living in the government-declared exclusion zones are not permitted to return home permanently. Only daytime visits are allowed on occasion (see Chris Meyers' report with the title "A year on, only brief home visits for Japan nuclear evacuees" published online by Reuters Feb. 13, 2012). The International Medical Corps aptly summarizes the challenges the evacuees have faced on its Fukushima Prefecture Fact Sheet.

Gamma radiation-based contamination map (high: orange; low: blue; dose rates can be obtained from the IMC Fukushima Prefecture fact sheet) showing the plume area, radii of the 12- and 15-mile evacuation zones as well as of the 50-mile ingestion zone US citizens were advised to avoid (source: NNSA).

In the meantime, the devastated power station's operator Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) has been arduously cleaning up the ruins, while keeping the stricken reactors cooled. Progress has been pain-staking slow. The molten fuel in the reactors has remained inaccessible because of forbiddingly high levels of radiation. Thousands of tons of nuclear fuel stored in water pools in and around the reactor buildings remain yet to be removed. Tank farms with contaminated cooling water have grown to vast proportions. Hisashi Hattori reports in his article with the title "High radiation bars decommissioning of Fukushima plant" published online Feb. 21, 2013, by The Asahi Shimbun: “Currently, there are nearly 500 storage tanks on the plant premises, many as tall as three-story buildings. TEPCO plans to add more by 2015 when it expects to have to store 700,000 tons of radioactive water.”

Birdseye view of Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Station in February, 2013. Unit 1 (top, left) has been enshrouded in a tent-like structure to control gassous radioactive effluents. The refueling floor of Unit 4 (top; right) has been cleared in preparation for a new roof structure. TEPCO is in the process of clearing debris off the refueling floor of Unit 3 (left of Unit 4). Note the sprawling tank farm for the storage of contaminated cooling water (source: House of Japan).

Despite TEPCO's strenuous efforts, significant amounts of radioactivity are still released into the environment every day (TEPCO press release with the title "Progress Status of the Long-and-mid Term Roadmap towards the Decommissioning of Units1-4 of TEPCO Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station" dated Oct. 22, 2012). Not a single nuclear fuel rod, spent or still in use at the time of the accident, has been removed from the damaged reactors, and the company has been unable to determine the precise location of the molten fuel in the ruined reactors.

Now, that we are nearing the two-year milestone, the international media have begun to gauge the current state of affairs in Fukushima. In her article with the title "Unexpected Post-Fukushima Health Woes: Depression, Obesity" posted on CommonHealth Reform and Reality Feb. 15, 2013, guest contributor Judy Foreman writes that no noticeable direct effects on public health could be attributed to the exposure to ionizing radiation. She tells us furthermore that an international panel of experts concluded that the estimated effective absorbed doses were too small to warrant any concerns for public health. Rather, the experts warned that radiophobia is deeply affecting people, developing into the preeminent medical condition threatening public health. Ms. Foreman notes depression and obesity are on the rise in Fukushima Prefecture, while Geoff Brumfiel reported in his news feature with the title "Fukushima: Fallout of fear" published online by the journal Nature Jan. 16, 2013, that depression, anger and anxieties were prevalent among the displaced.

Phobia is defined as irrational, disproportional fear. Radiophobia represents the irrational, disproportional fear of ionizing radiation. This diagnosis does not seem to pertain to the evacuees from Fukushima who must face fears of the actual consequences of the radiological catastrophe every day. Their fears seem neither irrational nor disproportional.

Absorbed radiation dose estimates available to date for the people of Fukushima must be met with caution. No resident around the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Station wore a dosimeter when the fallout rained down. In their preliminary Dose Assessment Report published last summer, radiation experts convened by the World Health Organization had to resort to computational models to estimate effective absorbed dose averages for the examined population. The averages were extrapolated from recordings of a handful of functional monitoring stations scattered across the prefecture. The recordings were incomplete. The available data did not cover the earliest hours of the accident (see The Mainichi article with the title "Fukushima radiation spread to residential areas hours before venting" published online Feb. 22, 2013). Moreover, it does not account for local variations and the contribution of human activity to individual effective absorbed doses.

Individual absorbed doses may depend profoundly on whether the person was indoors or outdoors at the time of the radioactive fallout, whether residents who stayed indoors were well insulated from the outside air, what produce a person consumed in the days and weeks after the releases, i.e. fresh home-grown groceries harvested in the garden and freshly-caught fish or prepackaged food bought in stores, as well as the source of water consumed. Moreover, medical predisposition, gender and age may have influenced how much radioactivity was incorporated and remains in the body.

Personal whole body counts were not performed early enough after the accident to directly capture the internal exposure to ionizing radiation emitted by incorporated short-lived radionuclides. By contrast, cesium-137 with a comparatively long half-life of 30 years is still concentrating in crops, vegetables, mushrooms and life stock and will persist to threaten the human food chain. A quarter century after the Chernobyl reactor accident, Bavarian wild boar stew must remain off the dinner table because the meat's radioactive cesium content is deemed unsafe for human consumption (see Charles Hawley's report with the title "A Quarter Century after Chernobyl: Radioactive Boar on the Rise in Germany" published by Spiegel International Online Jul. 30, 2010). In Japan, continuously emerging hot spots of cesium contamination may pose ever new local health risks for decades to come, requiring unrelenting, meticulous clean-up as well as persistent, diligent crop and life stock controls.

Thyroid cancer rates in Belarus after the Chernobyl reactor accident (source: S. Yamashita).

The health effects of the unleashed ionizing radiation may take more time to manifest themselves than two years. Demidchik and others (2007) showed that thyroid cancer rates in children began to increase noticeably three years after the Chernobyl reactor accident, though the cancers were attributable to iodine-131 from the accident with a half-life of only eight days.

Furthermore, yet unrecognized long-latency effects may progressively attain prevalence. Pets abandoned in the exclusion zone of Fukushima are frequently found ravaged by viral infections. Though the infections might have mainly been the result of the harsh living conditions in the zone (see Jenny Marder's post with the title "What's the Fallout for Dogs Near Fukushima?" published online by PBS Newshour's Rundown Nov. 10, 2011), high infection rates may suggest that immune responses have been compromised, possibly because of the protracted exposure to low-level ionizing radiation (Manda and others, 2012).

Cat rescued from the Fukushima exclusion zone showing symptoms of a severe viral infection around nose and eyes (source: Touhoku inunekokyuen).

In conclusion, it is too early to ascertain that the radioactive fallout from the stricken reactors will not directly affect public health. The anxieties the Fukushima evacuees harbor seem well grounded and will not be alleviated by official assertions, proclaiming the risk to health exists only in the mind. People's fears will dissipate only when government action effects palpable, lasting improvements.

References

• Demidchik YE, Saenko VA, Yamashita S (2007) Childhood thyroid cancer in Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine after Chernobyl and at present. Arq Bras Endocrinol Metab 51:748-762.
• Manda K, Glasow A, Paape D, Hildebrandt G (2012) Effects of ionizing radiation on the immune system with special emphasis on the interaction of dendritic and T cells. Front Oncol 2:102.

Acknowledgment
I thank the contributors of SimplyInfo.org without whom I could not have written this post.

A Marker to Remember

Villagers in the Alps must not fear tsunamis like the inhabitants of the east coast of Japan. But they must confront snow avalanches which may be highly destructive to home and life as well.

Unlike tsunamis in Japan, avalanches in the Alps recur with great regularity every year. Indeed, some avalanches fall with seemingly clockwork-like precision. Hamlets huddled on the slopes of deep, narrow valleys between towering mountains are particularly at risk. Over the centuries, the villagers maintained logs in which they meticulously recorded the time and date a particular avalanche descended, the precise area affected, the depth of the snow and its composition.

Topographic map of the surroundings of the village of Obergoms, Vs, Switzerland, showing the extent of avalanches (hatched) recorded in February, 1951, plus the paths of avalanches (arrows) noted between 1700 and 1999 (courtesy http://www.obergommer.ch).  

With the help of this knowledge, the villagers grew protective forests on the slopes above and erected barriers to hold back the snow masses on summits and ridges. They were able to designate uninhabitable zones that were indefensible. This tradition of prudence rooted in generation-old experience represents a powerful example telling us that our survival depends in no small way on our awareness of history and our willingness to learn from it.

Report of Japanese Government to the IAEA Ministerial Conference on Nuclear Safety, Fig. III-1-17.

Similarly, based on age-old experience with tsunamis, villagers in the Aneyoshi neighborhood of the modern-day city and fishing port of Miyako, Iwate Prefecture, on the northeast coast of Japan aptly erected a roadside marker, warning future generations that if they built their homes downhills from this point, their lives would be in peril (for review see Hideo Takagi's remarkable opinion piece with the title "Preserving the Remains in Areas Struck by the Tsunami-Applying the Aftermath of the Tragedy to Disaster Education and Enlightenment" posted on the Daily Yomiuri online). The humble stone monument can be seen in the left photograph above. The debris besides the road visible in the right photograph documents that the Tohoku-Oki Earthquake and Tsunami on Mar. 11, 2011, starkly proved the stone's inscription true (photograph below).

The marker's warning (photo by Dr. Masayuki Oishi).

The catastrophe exacted the greatest loss of lives in Japan's post-war history. Moreover, quake and tsunami devastated the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Station on the shores of the Pacific Ocean outside Fukushima City, precipitating the third nuclear reactor accident with fuel melt-downs in the history of the commercial use of nuclear power only rivaled by Three Mile Island in 1979 and Chernobyl in 1986. Four reactors suffered destructive explosions, radioactively contaminating air, land, and sea with yet unfathomable consequences. Mitigation is ongoing. The health of hundreds of thousands of people is at stake.

Radiation dose meter at Fukushima Medical University 35 miles from the stricken nuclear power station. The readings are continuously updated. In the week after the quake, dosemeter readings in Fukushima City spiked above 20 μSv/h. At this dose, we are exposed to an effective absorbed dose of 0.175 Sv in a year which corresponds to 17.5 rem; a dose that nuclear industry professionals perhaps accumulate over their entire career.

Perhaps, one day monuments similar to that on the road near Miyako will be erected in Fukushima at a safe distance from the ruins of the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Station, reminding future generations on their quest for ever more energy not to proceed beyond this point, because the price exacted is too high.

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