Two Japanese workers on the crew battling the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant have been hospitalized after being exposed to high levels of radiation while laying cable at the complex’s No. 3 reactor.
The two crew members, along with another who was exposed but didn’t require hospitalization, reportedly stepped into contaminated water while working in the reactor building’s basement, the Guardian reports. They were part of a team laying cables to connect a pump to a power supply in an effort to bring in fresh water for cooling the reactor.
The hospitalized workers were exposed to up to 180 millisieverts, which is nearly 30 times the amount of radiation the typical American receives in a year. The exposure is not considered grave — Japan last week set a yearly limit of 250 millisieverts a year for nuclear workers — but it raised concerns about the potential for accidental exposures.
Radiation continues to raise other fears. According to the Los Angeles Times, the elevated level of radiation in the water around the nuclear power plant has provoked jitters in the nation’s fishing industry, a pillar of the Japanese economy.
“I worry the radiation might move up the food chain,” said Tomoyuki Kondou, a veteran fisherman who was hundreds of miles out to sea when the quake and tsunami struck. “At first, the smaller fish will become infected and then will get eaten by the bigger fish.”
Radiation concerns — which sparked a warning more than 150 miles away in Tokyo to avoid using tap water in preparing baby formula — also fueled a scramble for bottled water, with merchants struggling to keep their shelves stocked.
Separately, The Washington Post reports that a Japanese agency that evaluated the Fukushima Daiichi complex found its safeguards sufficient in 2009 despite warnings from a member of its panel of experts about the dangers of a tsunami.
The expert, seismologist Yukinobu Okamura, was rebuffed by an executive of the operator of the Fukushima plant, Tokyo Electric Power Co., and officials concluded that the safety focus should be on the threats posed by a potential earthquake.
As it turned out, the plant apparently withstood this month’s magnitude 9.0 earthquake, but the subsequent tsunami knocked out the power needed to cool the reactors, leading to the ongoing nuclear disaster.
“Now I regret that I didn’t stress this more strongly, to push them to research this,” Okamura said.
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