In September 1999, there was a serious nuclear accident in Tokaimura, Japan. A man named Hisashi Ouchi was working at a nuclear power plant when it happened. The company he worked for, Japan Nuclear Fuel Conversion Co. (JCO), asked him and two others to mix a new batch of fuel. Unfortunately, they took a shortcut that went wrong, causing a disaster at a uranium processing plant.
At that time, safety measures were not sufficient, and there was a lot of pressure to meet deadlines. As a result of the accident, forty-nine people were exposed to radiation. Out of them, two received a lethal dose, and unfortunately, one of them was Hisashi Ouchi. The incident highlighted the importance of proper safety measures in nuclear facilities to prevent accidents and protect workers from exposure to harmful radiation.
Hisashi Ouchi was born in Japan in 1965 and started working in the nuclear energy field when his country was heavily reliant on nuclear power due to limited natural resources and expensive imported energy. The first commercial nuclear power plant in Japan was built just four years before Ouchi’s birth.
The power plant was located in Tokaimura and became a hub for nuclear reactors, research institutes, fuel enrichment, and disposal facilities. This led to one-third of the city’s population depending on the rapidly growing nuclear industry in the Ibaraki Prefecture.
On March 11, 1997, a terrifying explosion occurred at the power reactor in Tokaimura, resulting in the irradiation of dozens of people. The government initiated a cover-up to conceal negligence. However, an even more severe incident occurred two years later.
The Tokaimura accident in 1999 happened in a small plant where they prepared fuel for experiments, not for producing electricity. The plant belonged to JCO, a company that was once called Japan Nuclear Fuel Conversion Co. and was a part of Sumitomo Metal Mining Co. This plant in Tokai started operating in 1988. It dealt with up to 3 tons of uranium per year, enriched up to 20% U-235, which is much higher than what’s used in regular power reactors. They used a wet process for this.
The approved way to prepare nuclear fuel involves dissolving uranium oxide powder in nitric acid in a tank. Then, they transferred it as a pure solution to another column for mixing, followed by moving it to a precipitation tank. This tank had water cooling to manage the heat produced by the chemical reaction. They had safety measures to prevent a critical situation, which means an uncontrolled nuclear reaction.
However, the company changed its work procedure three years before the accident without getting permission from the authorities. They started dissolving uranium oxide in steel buckets instead of the designated tank. Operators also modified the process to make it faster by pouring the solution directly into the precipitation tank, bypassing safety controls. The mixing that was supposed to happen in the storage column was now done mechanically in the precipitation tank. Additionally, there was no proper control over the amount of material poured into the 100-liter precipitation tank, and its shape increased the risk of a critical situation.
Hisashi Ouchi and his colleagues had a job to clean reactor fuel. They were supposed to follow a specific method using an automatic pump to mix a limited amount of enriched uranium with nitric acid, as per the rules. However, they chose a short method.
According to the National Library of Medicine, instead of using the recommended method, they used a stainless-steel bucket to mix 16 kilograms of uranium with nitric acid, which was much more than the allowed amount. This happened in the early hours of September 30, 1999, causing a critical mass that led to an uncontrolled chain reaction. It took 18 hours for the workers to stop it, but the damage had already been done.
The excessive amount of uranium, 16 kilograms, was seven times more than what was permitted for the procedure. The consequences were not limited to the workers at the nuclear plant.
Over 60 people, including three rescue workers and seven golfers on a nearby course, were exposed to high levels of radiation. However, the most severely affected was Hisashi Ouchi, who was 35 years old at that time. To understand this, normal background radiation exposes individuals to about 2 to 4 millisieverts annually. Anything exceeding 5 sieverts is considered fatal. Hisashi, unfortunately, was exposed to about 17 sieverts of radiation.
After the accident, the men were taken to the National Institute of Radiological Sciences in Chiba, around a 50-minute drive from Tokyo. Some tests were done on Mr. Ouchi and Mr. Shinohara, and the results showed that the number of a type of blood called lymphatic blood had dropped almost to zero. They experienced symptoms like feeling sick, having diarrhea, and being very dehydrated.
In a book called “A Slow Death: 83 Days of Radiation Sickness,” written in 2002 by a team of journalists from Japan’s NHK-TV it was described that When Mr. Ouchi, a strong and handsome man who used to play rugby in high school and had a wife and young son, went to the hospital, he didn’t seem like someone who had been seriously exposed to radiation. His face was a bit red and swollen, and his eyes were bloodshot, but he didn’t have blisters or burns. However, he did complain about pain in his ears and hand. The doctor who checked him thought there might be a chance to save his life.
Sadly, Ouchi’s condition got worse within a day. He needed oxygen, and his abdomen swelled. As he was taken to the University of Tokyo hospital, things continued to deteriorate. Six days after the accident, a specialist examined images of Ouchi’s bone marrow cells and saw scattered black dots, indicating that the cells were broken into pieces. This meant Ouchi’s body couldn’t produce new cells. A week after the accident, Ouchi underwent a peripheral blood stem cell transplant, with his sister donating the cells.
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Mr. Ouchi experienced the highest level of radiation exposure that any person had ever faced. This means he had been exposed to a dangerous amount of radiation. As a result, he was in severe pain and found it extremely difficult to breathe. Three days later, the two men were moved to the University of Tokyo Hospital. They needed transfusion operations, which were seen as the only way to try and make their blood-producing functions work again.
At the time when this information was published in the BMJ (British Medical Journal), Mr. Ouchi was supposed to get peripheral stem cells from his sibling, and Mr. Shinohara was going to have a transfusion using congealed umbilical cord blood. A person from the International Atomic Energy Agency, named David Kyd, who worked in Vienna, said that the chances of both men surviving were very low.
Mr. Ouchi got sick after being exposed to radiation, as explained in the book. His health kept getting worse. He started feeling very thirsty, and when they took off the medical tape from his chest, his skin came off with it. He got blisters, and tests showed that the radiation had killed the chromosomes that help the skin heal. So, the outer layer of his skin, called the epidermis, gradually disappeared.
He needed many skin grafts and blood transfusions. Then, a specialist named Hisamura Hirai suggested something new and never tried before on radiation victims: stem cell transplants. This method aimed to quickly help Ouchi generate new blood. This process was faster than bone marrow transplants. Ouchi’s sister donated her own stem cells for the procedure. Strangely, it seemed to work initially, but Ouchi soon returned to a near-death state.
Photos of Mr. Ouchi’s chromosomes revealed severe damage caused by the radiation. The introduced cells were eradicated by the excessive radiation in his blood. Additionally, Mr. Ouchi’s skin grafts failed because his DNA couldn’t rebuild itself.
Feeling overwhelmed, Mr. Ouchi expressed his distress, saying, “I can’t take it anymore. I am not a guinea pig.” However, against his wishes, the doctors continued their experimental treatments even as Ouchi’s skin started melting.
On the 59th day in the hospital, Ouchi suffered a heart attack. Despite his family’s agreement to revive him in case of death, he had three heart attacks in one hour. With his DNA destroyed and increasing brain damage each time he died, Ouchi’s fate was sealed.
Finally, on December 21, at 11:21 p.m., Ouchi’s body couldn’t take it anymore, and he died. The cause of death was multiple organ failure. The Prime Minister of Japan at that time, Keizo Obuchi, expressed his condolences to Ouchi’s family and promised to make nuclear safety better.
Ouchi’s co-worker, Shinohara, also died in April 2000 because of multiple organ failure.
The Japanese government looked into the accident and found that it happened because there wasn’t enough oversight from regulators, there wasn’t a proper safety culture, and the workers didn’t have enough training. In April 2000, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission wrote a report about it. Six people from the company running the plant were charged with being careless in their jobs and breaking nuclear safety laws. In 2003, they were given suspended prison terms by a court, and the company and at least one person were fined.
Below is the interesting view shared by a Reddit user: (Source)
It’s important to understand that Hisashi didn’t touch anything radioactive, his cells were damaged once and then never again, so theoretically he should be able to recover once he got through radiation sickness. Also in the beginning they didn’t know it was 17 Sieverts, they thought it was 8, still more than enough to kill you.
After being hit by so much radiation he was going to be incredibly sick, so sick that the hospital immediately called the worlds best doctors to keep him alive. He was also such an anomaly that there was certainly a curiosity how long they could hold out. And they all knew it was going to be BAD.
So after a few days latency he starts getting sick, his skin dies but he doesn’t grow new skin, first they bandage it, then the skin graphs come. His chromosomes are a complete mess, luckily his sister is a match and she donates her stem cells. And things keep going like that, there is a massive problem and they keep finding solutions with their combined knowledge and a bit of luck.
At one point the muscles in his lungs had stopped working so they had to force air in and out through a tube, which blocked Hisashis ability to speak. Before they did that however Hisashi allegedly said that he wanted to make it through. AKA, his last wish.
And this just goes on, there is a problem and the doctors somehow manage to just keep him alive against all odds and they even start to see tiny little signs that his body is trying to recover, most notable the fresh skin cells growing on his side.
This was a round the clock job for everyone, the doctors and nurses were all basically living in the hospital and the family was staying in the waiting area, folding paper cranes, as in, the nurses brought in beds so the family could sleep comfortably.
Near the end the mix of drugs and treatments that Hisashi was going through was so complex at this point that the family had no chance of understanding where he stood and somehow his heart was still beating (at a steady 180 bpm).
I don’t blame the family for not pulling the plug, I don’t blame the doctors for trying every single thing they could think of in an attempt to keep him alive. I blame the higher ups of TNPP for putting three untrained men in a room with enough uranium to reach a self sustaining reaction.
