Contaminated nuke plant workers going back on job as safety regs go by wayside

[Generic Other]

Safety standards for workers at the tsunami-hit nuclear power plant in Fukushima Prefecture have been relaxed without any scrutiny, forcing workers to do their jobs without being completely decontaminated, it has emerged.

<snip>

An employee of one of the subcontractors at Fukushima plant said he worked there without such a special permit and was exposed to 1.3 millisieverts of radiation over a 2 1/2-hour period. Subsequent screening detected radioactive substances on the back of the employee's head and neck, as well as those of about 10 co-workers.

They washed with special shampoo at the nuclear crisis operations center about 20 kilometers away from the plant. However, three of them were unable to completely decontaminate themselves. They tried again at a TEPCO facility but failed to completely remove radioactive substances from their bodies. TEPCO subsequently issued a certificate specifying the areas of their bodies contaminated with radioactive material, and they returned to work.

http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/news/20110514p2a00m0na014000c.html

[robdogbucky]

1. Dying for TEPCO

Dying for TEPCO
By Paul Jobin

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

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 three hours per day at an hourly wage of 10,000 yen (about US$122). There is no information about danger, only the suggestion to ask the employer for further details on food, lodging, transportation and insurance. Those who answer these offers may have little awareness of the dangers and they are likely to have few other job opportunities. A rate of $122 an hour is hardly a king's ransom given the risk of cancer from high radiation levels. But TEPCO and the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA) keep diffusing their usual propaganda to minimize the radiation risks.

Rumor has it that many of the cleanup workers are burakumin (a minority group dating from Japan's feudal era and still often associated with discrimination). This cannot be verified, but it would be congruent with the logic of the nuclear industry and the difficult job situation of day laborers. Because of ostracism, some burakumin are also involved with yakuza, or organized crime groups. Therefore, it would not be surprising that yakuza-burakumin recruit other burakumin to go to Fukushima. Yakuza are active in recruiting day laborers of the yoseba (communities for day laborers): Sanya in Tokyo, Kotobukicho in Yokohama, and Kamagasaki in Osaka. People who live in precarious conditions are then exposed to high levels of radiation, doing the most dirty and dangerous jobs in the nuclear plants, then are sent back to the yoseba. Those who fall ill will not even appear in the statistics...

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Japan/ME04Dh01.html




Just more Extreme Enviroweenie Biased Claptrap on a rainy Sunday morning in California


rdb

[Generic Other]

3. Good job growth in this industry

NOT.

[Generic Other]

4. Workers are always expendable

Some things never change and are true the world over!

[Generic Other]

5. burakumin

The burakumin are descendants of outcast communities of the feudal era, which mainly comprised those with occupations considered "tainted" with death or ritual impurity (such as executioners, undertakers, workers in slaughterhouses, butchers or tanners), and traditionally lived in their own secluded hamlets and ghettos.

They were legally liberated in 1871 with the abolition of the feudal caste system. However, this did not put a stop to social discrimination and their lower living standards, because Japanese family registration (Koseki) was fixed to ancestral home address until recently, which allowed people to deduce their Burakumin membership. The Burakumin were one of the several groups discriminated against within Japanese society.

According to a survey conducted by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government in 2003,<1> 76% of Tokyo residents would not change their view of a close neighbor whom they discovered to be a burakumin; 0.5% of respondents, on the other hand, would actively avoid a burakumin neighbor. There is still a stigma attached to being a resident of certain areas traditionally associated with the burakumin and some lingering discrimination in matters such as marriage and employment.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burakumin

[PCIntern]

2. "They don't need no stinkin' regulations."

"No one has ever died from radiation or even cigarette smoking and all the scaredycat tree-huggers want to do is deny them a job. Typical gubmint intrusion into the private life of the Citizen."

This, or words to this effect, would be stated by teabaggers here if the plant(s) were located in the US of A.

Fortunately, banana consumption and stone-house living are stable among us. :sarcasm:

[tavalon]

6. Here's one specifically related to your field

Why is it a substance must be carefully mixed under a vent hood and later disposed of like the toxic waste that it appears to be, but while it's in my mouths a filling, it's inert? ie fillings?

[PCIntern]

11. Because....

there's virtually no free Hg in amalgamated restorations...that's why. You can Google the gamma phases of amalgam and come up with the science behind dispersed-phase alloys.

[tavalon]

12. So chewing gum doesn't change that?

[Xithras]

7. I thought TEPCO made it clear early on that this was a suicide job.

They only wanted older workers who were past their child-rearing years, and all that. It was pretty big news at the time, but they were compared to the Chernobyl workers who helped to seal the reactor...they did a massive service to Russia and the world, but all were dead within a few years.

Seems a little odd to worry about safety regs, when most of these people knew they were killing themselves when they went in there.

[Generic Other]

8. The temp workers are being misled in some cases

One reported he thought they were doing tsunami clean up north of Fukushima. He was not informed he would be working at the plant until they took him there.

Now that doesn't sound like voluntary suicide to me.

[Xithras]

9. Holy crap!

It's one thing to sacrifice your own life, by choice, for your people. It's another thing entirely to be conscripted into it against your will.

I hope TEPCO get's nailed hard for this.

[Generic Other]

10. Found the article!

Man ‘made to work’ at Fukushima Daiichi while clad in protective gear — “I was finally issued with a radiation dosimeter on my fourth day”

An Osaka man was made to work at the crippled nuclear power plant in Fukushima Prefecture for about two weeks, when he had been expecting to work in neighboring Miyagi Prefecture, said a job placement center in Osaka on Monday. <...>

"I was finally issued with a radiation dosimeter on my fourth day of work there," he was quoted as saying.

On March 17, the man accepted the offer of a job—details of which had been posted at the agency—in the Miyagi Prefecture town of Onagawa. Instead, he was immediately sent to the Fukushima Daiichi plant to work for six hours a day clad in protective gear, handling water to cool the Nos. 5 and 6 reactors there, the center said. <...>

http://enenews.com/man-made-to-work-to-fukushima-daiichi-i-was-finally-issued-with-a-radiation-dosimeter-on-my-fourth-day