One of the Fukushima 50 shares his story
The engineer says he moved offsite for a few days to a disaster-response building in the town of Okuma, 5 km away. But on 15 and 16 March 2011 the situation at Daiichi reached its most critical phase. A series of hydrogen explosions had left much of the complex a tangled mess of radioactive concrete and steel. Unit three had exploded, three reactors were in meltdown and over 1000 fuel rods in the reactor four building, normally covered under 16 feet of water, had boiled dry, raising the spectre of a nuclear fission chain reaction. In his darkest moments, Mr Yoshizawa admits he shared the same fear as other experts – that the crisis could also trigger the evacuation of the Fukushima Daini plant 10 km away.
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Now dealing with waste and fuel management, and back at Tepco headquarters, he says the work at the plant has far from ended. “Nobody has any experience of trying to safely extract nuclear fuel after such an accident,” he says. British and US engineers are helping in a collective effort that will take many years. He gets uncomfortable when he returns to Fukushima and has to remember the crisis. His family never discusses what happened. “My wife and children have already seen so much on TV and they don’t want to see or hear anything more about it. Occasionally they will ask me if I’m OK and I tell them what I tell you: I don’t have any problems.”
Living in limbo: refugees’ grievances
Two years on, thousands of people forced to leave their homes in the wake of the Fukushima disaster are living in limbo, yet to receive compensation and unable to move back owing to dangerous radiation.
More than 160,000 people were forcibly evacuated from the area when an earthquake and tsunami crippled the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant on 11 March 2011, and tens of thousands left voluntarily.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/i-am-one-of-the-fukushima-fifty-one-of-the-men-who-risked-their-lives-to-prevent-a-catastrophe-shares-his-story-8517394.html