Dying for TEPCO? Fukushima’s Nuclear Contract Workers

[NNN0LHI]

http://japanfocus.org/-Japan-Focus/3523

Paul Jobin

While the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) experiences difficulties in recruiting workers willing to go to Fukushima to clean up the damaged reactors, the WHO is planning to conduct an epidemiological survey on the catastrophe. This is the first of two reports by Paul Jobin offering a worker-centered analysis of the Fukushima nuclear disaster.

Liquidators recruited by ads

In the titanic struggle to bring to closure the dangerous situation at Fukushima Nuclear Plant No1, there are many signs that TEPCO is facing great difficulties in finding workers. At present, there are nearly 700 people at the site. As in ordinary times, workers rotate so as to limit the cumulative dose of radiation inherent in maintenance and cleanup work at the nuclear site. But this time, the risks are greater, and the method of recruitment unusual.

Job offers come not from TEPCO but from Mizukami Kogyo, a company whose business is construction and cleaning maintenance. The description indicates only that the work is at a nuclear plant in Fukushima Prefecture. The job is specified as 3 hours per day at an hourly wage of 10,000 yen. There is no information about danger, only the suggestion to ask the employer for further details on food, lodging, transportation and insurance.

[TheWraith]

1. Dying? The legal limit for radiation exposure for these folks is 100 millisieverts.

You would need twenty or thirty times as much to potentially be fatal.

[AndyTiedye]

2. Only if You Don't Count a Hugely Elevated Risk of Cancer

[TheWraith]

3. Except that there is little to no elevated risk of cancer.

The 100 millisievert limit is common because it's the level at or below which there is no significantly heightened risk of cancer. A 100 millisievert dose is roughly equivalent to a 1% increase in cancer risk.