Speaker 1: Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff. I'm Josh, and
Speaker 1: there's Chuck, and Jerry's sitting in for Dave, and this
Speaker 1: is Short Stuff, a really sad edition.
Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure, because this is about a nuclear accident,
Speaker 2: and one very famous victim of that accident, a man
Speaker 2: in Japan named Hisashi Ouchi.
Speaker 1: Mm-hmm.
Speaker 2: Who at the time was a 35-year-old worker at a
Speaker 2: nuclear facility. And he got a massive blast of radiation
Speaker 2: in 1999. It was called a criticality accident. And what
Speaker 2: was the name of the town?
Speaker 1: In Takaimura. Takaimura. Okay, great.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Or no, Tokaimura, sorry. And that's called the Tokaimura nuclear
Speaker 1: accident is what it's called. And like you said, it
Speaker 1: was a criticality because there wasn't like a nuclear explosion
Speaker 1: or anything like that. It was an uncontrolled nuclear fission
Speaker 1: reaction that these guys accidentally created while they were doing
Speaker 1: their job processing uranium oxide into usable uranium-235 fuel to
Speaker 1: be used in an actual nuclear reactor. This is not
Speaker 1: a nuclear plant. It was the kind of plant that
Speaker 1: produces fuel for nuclear plants.
Speaker 2: That's right. This is the morning of September 30th, 1999.
Speaker 2: And what they specifically were doing in that moment was
Speaker 2: they were dissolving that uranium oxide, like you were saying.
Speaker 2: And this was the procedure. What I'm describing now is
Speaker 2: the approved procedure, actually. Yeah, right. So they were supposed
Speaker 2: to have dissolved that uranium oxide in a geometrically safe vessel.
Speaker 2: And then what you end up with is uranyl nitrite solution.
Speaker 2: And you put that into a buffer tank and then transfer,
Speaker 2: you know, little bits of that into a precipitation tank.
Speaker 2: This company, is it JCO is the name of the company?
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: They said, all right, we're going to speed this up.
Speaker 2: And this procedure is not approved. But what we want
Speaker 2: you guys to do is mix the solution in stainless
Speaker 2: steel buckets and then pour it directly into the precipitation tank.
Speaker 1: And not only pour it directly in the precipitation tank,
Speaker 1: pour so much in there that we have like five
Speaker 1: to six times the approved amount in that precipitation tank
Speaker 1: at once, right?
Speaker 2: I think there's like seven times. Okay.
Speaker 1: A lot, a lot more than was supposed to be
Speaker 1: in there. And I just want to point out, like
Speaker 1: you were saying, there was an approved procedure and JCO said,
Speaker 1: nuts to that. We're going to do this faster one. Right.
Speaker 1: That's just what they were doing with their workers. It's
Speaker 1: crazy because this is nuclear uranium 235 fuel that they're making.
Speaker 1: And so when they put in these three workers, including
Speaker 1: Hisashi Ouchi, when they put in the seventh bucket of
Speaker 1: this stuff into the directly in the precipitation tank, There
Speaker 1: were 16.6 kilos or 36.6 pounds of uranium in there,
Speaker 1: which is way more than was allowed to be in there.
Speaker 1: I think it was 2.4 keys or kilograms that was
Speaker 1: allowed to be in there. And they had 16.6, Chuck.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So that reached critical mass pretty quickly and started
Speaker 2: a self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction. And like you said, it
Speaker 2: wasn't like an explosion or anything like that, but it
Speaker 2: was a huge burst. of neutron and gamma radiation, like
Speaker 2: incredible Hulk levels. And it went on and off for
Speaker 2: about 20 hours until the emergency workers finally drained water
Speaker 2: from the tank's cooling jacket and then added boric acid
Speaker 2: to absorb the neutrons. But, you know, very sadly, OUCHI
Speaker 2: received a dose equivalent of 17 sieverts. It's kind of
Speaker 2: hard to like get an exact calculation, but It was
Speaker 2: an incredibly large amount of radiation, like so much that
Speaker 2: they have. He's been called the most radioactive man in history,
Speaker 2: which is a bit of a misnomer because he had
Speaker 2: this burst of radiation. But it's not like he was
Speaker 2: walking around like radioactive to other people or anything like that.
Speaker 1: It's a little surprising to me, but OK, well, I'll
Speaker 1: take that. I did a little bit of Josh math here, Chuck.
Speaker 2: Oh, boy.
Speaker 1: Well, it's not even Josh math. It's more Josh checking.
Speaker 1: So you said that Oichi received 17 sieverts of radiation, right? Yeah.
Speaker 1: I'm not laughing at that.
Speaker 2: I'm laughing at your math, by the way.
Speaker 1: No, I understand.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: One millirem is equal to 0.00001 sieverts. Okay? Okay. You
Speaker 1: get 20 millirems from a chest X-ray. He got 17
Speaker 1: sieverts all at once. Wow. I mean, that's just such
Speaker 1: a mind-boggling amount of radiation that I can't believe he
Speaker 1: didn't die immediately. I say we take a break and
Speaker 1: come back and talk about Ochi's agonizing 83 days of
Speaker 1: life that followed that radiation exposure. All right.
Speaker 2: We'll be right back.
Speaker 1: So, Chuck, before we broke, I was saying I was
Speaker 1: surprised that he didn't die immediately.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: The reason he didn't die immediately is because it takes
Speaker 1: a little while for the incredible damage that the radiation
Speaker 1: did to his body to actually take effect. But what
Speaker 1: it did, essentially, was it blasted through every cell in
Speaker 1: Hisashi Oichi's body and damaged the DNA inside so much
Speaker 1: so that the doctors caring for him said that he
Speaker 1: had completely, or the radiation had completely shattered his chromosomes.
Speaker 1: The actual packets that hold the DNA in your cells
Speaker 1: were just shattered. They couldn't find chromosomal structures throughout his
Speaker 1: body that weren't just totally messed up.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we should mention there were three guys in the
Speaker 2: immediate area. He was the one closest to the tank.
Speaker 2: There was another guy a little less close to the tank.
Speaker 2: And then I guess the third guy even less close
Speaker 2: to the tank. Ouchi was taken to a local hospital
Speaker 2: at first, obviously, like very quickly, and then transferred to
Speaker 2: the National Institute of Radiological Sciences in Chiba, but then
Speaker 2: eventually would end up at the University of Tokyo Hospital
Speaker 2: for some really extensive specialized treatment. Specialized meaning like they
Speaker 2: had no roadmap for this. So they were kind of
Speaker 2: trying anything.
Speaker 1: Exactly. they got in touch with his sister who was like, hey,
Speaker 1: he is not really able to produce new white blood cells. Basically,
Speaker 1: any fast-growing, fast-regenerating cell, it took the damage the most.
Speaker 1: And that's where it showed up first because those are
Speaker 1: the cells that are dividing. And now that their DNA
Speaker 1: is messed up, they're dividing in all sorts of terrible ways.
Speaker 1: So the things that made up like the lining to
Speaker 1: his gut, those fast-dividing cells, they started to show problems first.
Speaker 1: His skin... And then his bone marrow that produces white
Speaker 1: blood cells, red blood cells, all sorts of really important stuff.
Speaker 1: That was probably the biggest problem because he was very
Speaker 1: vulnerable to infection without a bunch of white blood cells
Speaker 1: or not producing correct ones anymore. So they went to
Speaker 1: his sister and said, hey, can you donate some bone marrow?
Speaker 1: And she did. Yeah.
Speaker 2: So, you know, like I said, they were trying blood
Speaker 2: transfusions at first, stem cell transplants. And that's where his
Speaker 2: sister came into play. And initially, it showed like that
Speaker 2: transplant produced some new white blood cells. But very quickly,
Speaker 2: they started getting damaged and, you know, basically in the
Speaker 2: same way. He was just so riddled with it. And
Speaker 2: his skin and his intestinal lining couldn't regenerate normally. He
Speaker 2: had to constantly get fluids like replaced all throughout his body.
Speaker 2: He was on respiratory support. and like organ failure started
Speaker 2: to set in. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So the guy who was second closest when that radiation
Speaker 1: blast went off, his name was Masato Shinohara. And he
Speaker 1: died from his injuries in 2000, April 2000. But about
Speaker 1: four months before, on December 21st, 1999, Hisachi Ouchi died
Speaker 1: at the University of Tokyo Hospital. And it had been
Speaker 1: 83 days since he had undergone that blast of radiation.
Speaker 1: And so, of course, this made really big news around
Speaker 1: Japan and around the world. This is nuts that anybody
Speaker 1: even lasted that long, let alone just the grisliness of
Speaker 1: the whole thing. So everybody was like, how did this
Speaker 1: happen at all? And they started looking at JCO. It
Speaker 1: turns out JCO was a terrible, terrible company that had
Speaker 1: no business doing something as important and dangerous as nuclear
Speaker 1: fuel production.
Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure. That third worker survived, by the way,
Speaker 2: out of the three. But yeah, JCO had allowed a
Speaker 2: lot of shortcuts to happen. Like you said, the instructions
Speaker 2: just for this were that wasn't the approved procedure. There
Speaker 2: was not a lot of regulatory approval going on. The
Speaker 2: workers didn't have safety training that they needed. The facility
Speaker 2: didn't have a critical incident alarm, which is crazy. They
Speaker 2: just I guess they thought that like there wouldn't be
Speaker 2: that kind of accident there.
Speaker 1: That's what happened at Three Mile Island. Hubris.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right. That same thing. They also weren't conducting
Speaker 2: the kind of inspections routinely that they needed to. And
Speaker 2: that might have turned up like, hey, this process that
Speaker 2: we're using is like really unsafe and we should be
Speaker 2: using the approved process.
Speaker 1: So I just want to point out, I think it's
Speaker 1: probably clear, but I just want to make 100 percent clear.
Speaker 1: These three workers were not taking their own shortcut. They
Speaker 1: were doing the procedure that their company was telling them to,
Speaker 1: which was a dangerous shortcut. So the dangerous shortcut was
Speaker 1: official company procedure. Right. Yeah.
Speaker 2: So as far as the official like procedure. blame or whatever,
Speaker 2: the International Atomic Energy Agency said it was human error
Speaker 2: combined with serious breaches of safety principles. For JCO's part, they,
Speaker 2: in 2003, six of the officials got suspended prison sentences
Speaker 2: for professional negligence. The company was fined and they couldn't,
Speaker 2: they had shut down the plant, didn't they?
Speaker 1: They did. They would think it was the first time
Speaker 1: ever that a company lost its license to, to, enriched
Speaker 1: nuclear fuel in Japan. Yeah. And then also they were like,
Speaker 1: you know, these safety inspectors that didn't do the proper
Speaker 1: inspections that were to turn up that issue with the
Speaker 1: different procedure, they fell down too. So Japan really kind
Speaker 1: of bulked up its nuclear stuff and now everything's great. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I mean, you know, it exposed like what could happen.
Speaker 2: And I think with every time we do something like this,
Speaker 2: like It's like they're very sad stories, but it seems
Speaker 2: like they come out on the other side with like,
Speaker 2: all right, now we're trying to do it right. Don't
Speaker 2: you think?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think because in this case, JCO maybe wasn't
Speaker 1: powerful enough to try to fight having to change. So
Speaker 1: it did end up for the best.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Anything else?
Speaker 2: I got nothing else.
Speaker 1: Well, I say you give it to him.
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