It was, recalls Atsufumi Yoshizawa, a suicide mission: volunteering to return to a dangerously radioactive nuclear power plant on the verge of tipping out of control. As he said goodbye to his colleagues they saluted him, like soldiers in battle. The wartime analogies were hard to avoid: in the international media he was a kamikaze, a samurai or simply one of the heroic Fukushima The descriptions still embarrass him.
A stoic, soft-spoken man dressed in the blue utility suit of his embattled employer Tokyo Electric Power Co. Fish caught near the plant this month contained over 5, times safe radiation limits, according to state broadcaster NHK. Over , people have been displaced from their homes near the plant, perhaps permanently, and are fighting for proper compensation. Stress, divorce and suicides and plague the evacuees. His eyes brim with tears at points in his story, which begins with the magnitude-9 quake less than miles away from the plant under the sea on 11 March Mr Yoshizawa was in charge of reactors five and six, which at the time were shut down for maintenance.
Waves of 13 to 15 metres high washed over the 5. Water flooded the basements of the turbine buildings, on the ocean side of the reactors, shorting out electric switching units and disabling 12 of the 13 emergency generators and then backup batteries, the last line of defence. There was no power to pump water to the nuclear core and carry off the heat, or even measure the radiation.
The engineers had lost control over the complex. Meltdown had begun. Mr Yoshiizawa recalls hearing the first reports inside the bunker of oil tanks and cars floating in water outside.
The crisis quickly deepened. Just over 15 hours after the power loss, uranium fuel melted through the pressure vessel of reactor number one. Units two and three were not far behind. Thousands fled from nearby towns and villages. There was no plan for what to do next because Tepco had never predicted total loss of power at a plant. There was no question of panic, or running back to see them, he insists. The engineer says he moved offsite for a few days to a disaster-response building in the town of Okuma, 5 km away.
