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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2025
The hydrogen explosions at the three Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plants in March 2011 launched one of the largest disasters in industrial history. A year after the Japanese government declared that the reactors were under control, experts continued to find radioactive leaks. According to TEPCO's latest estimate, cleaning up the mess—removing fuel rods and debris, decommissioning the reactors, and decontaminating some of the surroundings—will take four decades and cost at least $125 billion.” Along the way, thousands of workers will be exposed annually to levels of radiation well in excess of 20 milliSieverts, the internationally recognized maximum limit for normal working conditions.
1 This figure represents TEPCO's estimate in November 2012 (as reported in Hasegawa Kyoko, “Fukushima operator warns clean-up ‘may cost $125 bn’,” AFP Nov. 7, 2012). Iwata Kazumasa of the Japan Center for Economic Research warned that taking into account various forms of compensation payments, costs could reach $250 billion (as reported in http://newsonjapan.com/html/newsdesk/article/ 89987.php and elsewhere).
2 The ICRP sets no dose restrictions for emergency, life-saving operations conducted by “informed volunteers” in cases when the “benefit to others outweighs rescuer's risk”, and restrictions of 500-1000 mSv in the case of “other urgent rescue operations.” It suggests total occupational exposures be limited to 100 milliSieverts for recovery operations. For an overview of these recommendations, see Table 10 (p. 64) in Nuclear Energy Agency, OECD, Evolution of ICRP Recommendations 1977, 1990 and 2007: Changes in Underlying Science and Protection Policy and their Impact on European and UK Domestic Regulation (NEA No. 6920, OCED 2011).
3 Figures for Chernobyl are endlessly controversial: the number of liquidators, their exposures, and the number of deaths and illnesses resulting from the accident have been subject to debate for years. Overview of official figures (i.e., those sanctioned by UN-affiliated institutions), can be found at http://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/chernobyl.html (for UNCSEAR) and http://www.who.int/ionizing_radiation/chernobyl/en/ (for the WHO; both accessed 6 December 2012). An alternative analysis, based on some 5000 Slavic-language studies, is presented in A. V. Yablokov et al., Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, vol. 1181 (2009).
4 In August, the government brought limits for the public back down to the pre-accident level of 1 mSv. A few months later, the annual exposure limit for workers followed suit, dropping to its pre-accident limit of 50 mSv. This is the same as the US limit, and more than twice the ICRP-recommended annual limit. The commission is purely advisory; it has no regulatory authority. Nations set their own limits.
5 Disasters have given rise to scholarship in many different disciplines. For an overview of the origins of disaster expertise in the US, see Scott Gabriel Knowles, The Disaster Experts: Mastering Risk in Modern America (Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). The classic text on the ordinary problems of complex technological systems is Charles Perrow, Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies (Princeton University Press, updated edition 1999). For a case study of social, legal, and scientific responses to a large-scale industrial disaster, see Kim Fortun, Advocacy after Bhopal: Environmentalism, Disaster, New Global Orders (University of Chicago Press, 2001).
6 The National Diet of Japan, The Official Report of Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission (Executive Summary), 2012.
7 This figure is taken from the monthly report compiled by the Japan Atomic Industrial Forum; the October 2012 report is available at http://www.jaif.or.jp/english/news_images/pdf/E NGNEWS01_1352274658P.pdf (accessed 6 December 2012). Other sources give higher numbers.
8 Cordula Meyer, “Fukushima Workers Risk Radiation to Feed Families,” Spiegel Online International, Sept. 21, 2011.
9 Suzuki Tomohiko, The Yakuza and Nuclear Power: An Undercover Report from Fukushima Daiichi (Tokyo: Bungeishunju Ltd. 2011), translation excerpt at http://www.booksfromjapan.jp/publications/ite m/1176-the-yakuza-and-nuclear-power-an- undercover-report-from-fukushima-daiichi, accessed 13 December 2011.
10 Ibid.
11 Jake Adelstein, “First Arrest Made Linking Yakuza with Fukushima Nuclear Clean-Up Crews,” The Atlantic Wire, May 22, 2012.
12 Ibid.
13 Tada Toshio, “TEPCO: Half of contract workers at Fukushima work under dodgy conditions,” The Asahi Shimbun, Dec. 5, 2012.
14 TadaToshio, “8 companies face order to stop illegal labor practice at Fukushima plant,” The Asahi Shimbun, Dec. 10, 2012.
15 “TEPCO subcontractor used lead to fake dosimeter readings at Fukushima plant,”The Asahi Shimbun, July 21, 2012.
16 “40% of Workers Had No Dosimeter at Nuke Plant Soon After Disaster,” The Asahi Shimbun, Sept. 4, 2012.
17 Kageyama Yuri, “Toshiba shows four-legged robot for nuke disaster,” Associated Press, Nov 21, 2012.
18 For vivid accounts of the need to improvise during reactor operations, see Constance Perin, Shouldering Risks: the Culture of Control in the Nuclear Power Industry (Princeton University Press, 2005) and Pierre Fournier, Travailler dans le nucléaire: enquête au coeur d'un site à risques (Armand Colin, 2012).
19 Paul Jobin, “Dying for TEPCO? Fukushima's Nuclear Contract Workers,”The Asia-Pacific Journal Vol 9, Issue 18 No 3, May 2, 2011.
20 Yuki Tanaka, “Nuclear Power Plant Gypsies in High-Tech Society,” pp. 251-271 in Joe Moore, ed., The Other Japan: Conflict, Compromise and Resistance since 1945 (M.E. Sharpe for the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, 1997).
21 Ibid.
22 Higuchi and the workers he followed are featured in the 1995 BBC film “Nuclear Ginza,” available for viewing at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_qb0uAc1dg, accessed 13 December 2012.
23 Paul Jobin, “Fukushima ou la radioprotection, retour sur un terrain interrompu,” in A. Thébaud-Mony, P. Jobin, V. Daubas-Letourneux, N. Frigul, eds., Santé au travail, de quoiparlons-nous? (Paris: La Découverte, 2012), p. 100.
24 Jobin, ibid., pp. 90-96.
25 Jobin, ibid., p. 100.
26 Its name at that time was the International X- ray and Radium Protection Committee.
27 For an insider history, see Roger Clarke and Jack Valentin, “A History of the International Commission on Radiological Protection.” Health Physics 88, no. 4 (2005). For an insider history of radiological standards in the US, see J. Samuel Walker, Permissible Dose : A History of Radiation Protection in the Twentieth Century (University of California Press, 2000).
28 Soraya Boudia, “Global Regulation: Controlling and Accepting Radioactivity Risks,” History and Technology, 23:4 (2007): 389-406; Soraya Boudia, “Sur les dynamiques de constitution des systèmes d'expertise scientifique. La naissance du système d'évaluation et de régulation des risques des rayonnementsionisants,” Genèses, 70 (2008): 26-44.
29 ICRP, “ICRP Publication 22. Implications of Commission Recommendations that Doses be kept As Low As Readily Achievable. A report of ICRP Committee 4.” Pergamon Press for the ICRP, 1973), 3.
30 B. Lindell, “Basic Concepts and Assumptions behind the new ICRP recommendations,” in IAEA, Application of the Dose Limitation System for Radiation Protection: Practical Implications. Proceedings of a Topical Seminar on the Practical Implications of the ICRP Recommendations (1977) and the Revised IAEA Basic Standards for Radiation Protection, Vienna, 5-9 March 1979, 3. Emphasis mine.
31 As explained by the ICRP's David Sowby; see Catherine Caufield, Multiple exposures: chronicles of the radiation age (University of Chicago Press, 1990), 183.
32 The term comes from Annie Thébaud-Mony, Nuclear Servitude: Subcontracting and Health in the French Civil Nuclear Industry (Baywood Publishing Company, 2011).
33 Shawna Galassi, “Into The Bowels Of A Nuclear Reactor: They're called Jumpers and they go where no one else will,” New Times San Luis Obispo, Jan 21, 2004.
34 Writing in the early 1980s, freelance journalist Paul Bagne found that “while electrical output from nuclear plants actually fell from 1978 to 1980, the number of exposed workers grew from 44,000 to 77,000. Of these, nearly half were temporary.” It's not clear how many of these workers were involved in the cleanup of the 1979 Three Mile Island accident. Paul Bagne, “The Glow Boys: How Desperate Workers are Mopping Up America's Nuclear Mess,” Mother Jones (November 1982): 24-27, 44-46. In the 1980s, German journalist Gunter Wallraff posed as a Turkish guest worker in order to investigate workplace discrimination; in his time on a reactor decontamination team, he found that Turkish workers received flimsier protective clothing than German employees. See Gunter Wallraff, Lowest of the Low (Mandarin, 1988; German edition in 1985).
35 In Annie Thébaud-Mony, op.cit.
36 Notably through NGOs such as the Association Henri Pézerat and Santé sous- traitanceNucléaire-Chimie, sites such as Ma zone contrōlée, and films such as Arrêt de tranche, ou les trimardeurs du nucléaire (Catherine Pozzo Di Borgo, dir., 1994), and Alain de Halleux, RAS nucléaire rien à signaler.
37 John. M. Glionna, “Japan's ‘nuclear gypsies’ face radioactive peril at power plants,”Los Angeles Times, Dec. 4, 2011.
38 SonniEfron, “System of Disposable Laborers,” Los Angeles Times, Dec. 30, 1999. This phenomenon is documented by Thébaud- Mony (op.cit.) and Fournier (op. cit.) for French reactors.
39 Fournier op.cit.; Gabrielle Hecht, The Radiance of France: Nuclear Power and National Identity after World War II (MIT Press, new edition 2009).
40 For France, see Thébaud-Mony, op. cit.; for Japan, see Tanaka, op. cit.
41 Including for Fukushima: The National Diet of Japan, The Official Report of Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission (Executive Summary), 2012.
42 Cardis, E. et al., “Risk of cancer after low doses of ionising radiation: Retrospective cohort study in 15 countries,” British Medical Journal, 331 (7508, July 9, 2005): 77, cited in Thébaud-Mony, op. cit., xxii-xxv.
43 Gabrielle Hecht, Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade (MIT Press and Wits University Press, 2012); Gabrielle Hecht, “Africa and the Nuclear World: Labor, Occupational Health, and the Transnational Production of Uranium,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 51/4 (October 2009): 896-926.
44 Jay H. Lubinet et al., “Radon and Lung Cancer Risk: A Joint Analysis of 11 Underground Miners Studies,” NIH report 94-3644 (National Institutes of Health, 1994).
45 Miki Aoki and Jun Sato, “CROOKED CLEANUP (2): Some decontamination workers sorry for following orders,” The Asahi Shimbun, Jan. 4, 2013; Tamiyuki Kihara and Miki Aoki, “CROOKED CLEANUP: Government mishandled complaints about shoddy cleanup work,” The Asahi Shimbun, Jan. 5, 2013; “CROOKED CLEANUP: Government to investigate Fukushima decontamination,” The Asahi Shimbun, Jan. 7, 2013. At this writing, The Asahi Shimbun is running an ongoing series on these practices: readers can search for the keywords “crooked cleanup” to find all the articles.
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