People high up in the organization began to realize that there had to be a criticality on site, and it looked as if it was in the Fuel Conversion Test Building from the high gamma readings near it. No concentration of the gamma rays from uranium could make radiation with this intensity. Nuclear fuel is radioactive, but not that radioactive. Somewhere, a reactor was running. Studying the pen-chart recordings, they could see that it had started up with a large surge of supercriticality, then settled down into quasi-stable critical condition, and the power level dropped gradually by about half in the next 17 hours. They had to find a way to shut it down.
After 4.5 hours, radiation was detected beyond the plant’s fence, with gamma rays and neutrons streaming into the streets of Tokaimura. The mayor suggested that people living within 0.2 miles of the plant should probably go somewhere else. After 12 hours, government authorities stepped in and suggested that people within 7.5 miles of the plant should stay indoors and not take deep breaths. The solution in the reactor was apparently boiling, with steam coming out the open port on top of the tank. Highly radioactive fission products, the scourge of nuclear power, were falling all around in a light, invisible mist.
A plan was worked out to kill the chain reaction, and workers volunteered to execute it shortly after midnight on October 1. Precipitation Tank B was water-cooled by a jacket encircling it. All they had to do was drain the water out of the cooling jacket and the reaction would stop. Neutrons reflected back into the uranium solution from the jacket were all that was maintaining the fission. It seemed simple, but it turned out that it was a lot easier to put water into the jacket than it was to remove it. The piping would have to be disassembled, and it could be done from outside the walls of the plant, but the radiation was still too high for men to work on the plumbing. They had to approach the pipes in relays, with each man allowed to absorb no more than 10 rem (0.1 sievert) of radiation.
The last drop of water was drained from the cooling jacket after the reactor had been running 17 hours. The power level dropped by a factor of four, but it leveled off. The thing was still critical. There was still water trapped in the system. It took three more hours, but the plant workers were finally able to shut it down by blowing out the water using pressurized argon gas. Just to make sure, they pumped a borax solution into the tank through a rubber hose.[183]
Hisashi Ouchi, 35 years old, had received about 1,700 rem of mixed radiation. He was burned over most of his body, and his white-blood-cell count had dropped to near zero. He died 82 days later of multiple organ failure. Masato Shinohara, 40 years old, expired on April 27, 2000, 210 days after the accident. He had absorbed 1,000 rem, teetering on the border of a fatal dose. Yutaka Yokokawa was hit with 300 rem. He left the hospital on December 20, 1999, and he is still alive and well.[184]
At least 439 plant workers, firemen, and emergency responders were exposed to high levels of radiation, as were 207 residents near the plant. Although their exposures were probably 1,000 times the normal background radiation, there have been no unusual sickness or radiation effects reported from these people. The mindset at all levels of the JCO organization and the government regulators had been that no such accident was possible, and therefore there were no accident plans, no review of work procedures, and little thought was put into the equipment layout. The workers were minimally trained, and the primary goal was for everyone to work more efficiently. The Japanese work ethic, for all its strengths, would have to be modified for this peculiar line of endeavor. The JCO uranium-conversion activities ceased in 2003, due to regulatory pressures and dwindling profits, and Japan’s high hopes for nuclear power suffered along with the rest of the economy in a decades-long recession.
A summary of production disasters would be incomplete without mention of the Kyshtym catastrophe near the Mayak plant in Russia. It may go down in history as the worst release of radioactive fission products to have ever occurred, or it may not. Of all the significant nuclear accidents, this one was a black hole in the firmament of knowledge for many decades, locked up tightly by both the Soviet KGB intelligence service and the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States.[185] With so little information to go on, speculation ran rampant and wild theories rushed into the vacuum. All we had was a trickle of partial, confusing reports taken third-hand from some excitable defectors or exiles. We could not even tell when this contaminating incident had occurred, with dates ranging from 1954 to 1961. It looked as if several lesser incidents may have been woven together into a combined story.
What type of accident was it? It was variously described as an earthquake, a landslide, an accidental A-bomb detonation, a test-drop from a Soviet bomber, a reactor explosion, a graphite fire in a reactor, a meteor hit, and a steam explosion in a holding tank. No explanation made sense, and overflights by U-2 spy planes trying to find visual confirmation of a nuclear catastrophe were curtailed by the loss of Gary Powers’s plane over Mayak. Articles, papers, and even books were written about it, but the mystery of what happened at Kyshtym would not be solved until the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union in 1989.
The first published inkling of a radiological problem in the East Ural Mountains claims to be the June 1958 edition of Cosmic Voice, the monthly journal of The Aetherius Society.[186] On April 18, 1958, George King, founder of the society in 1955, was contacted telepathically by two beings riding around in a UFO.[187] The first message was from an individual identified only by origin, Mars Sector 6:
Owing to an atomic accident just recently in the USSR, a great amount of radioactivity in the shape of radioactive iodine, strontium 90, radioactive nitrogen and radioactive sodium have been released into the atmosphere of Terra.
This message, relayed through King’s larynx and recorded on a reel-to-reel tape, was followed by a second pronouncement from The Master Aetherius from Venus:
All forms of reception from Interplanetary sources will become a little more difficult during the next few weeks because of the foolish actions of Russia. They have not yet declared to the world as a whole, exactly what happened in one of their atomic research establishments. Neither have they declared how many people were killed there. Neither have they declared that they were really frightened by the tremendous release of radioactive materials from this particular establishment during the accident….
The report goes on to claim that the Interplanetary Parliament will have to use an enormous amount of energy to clean up this mess. They were, however, able by Divine Intervention to save 17,000,000 people from having been “forced to vacate their physical bodies,” which may be a euphemism meaning to die of acute radiation poisoning. They were given permission by the Lords of Karma to intervene on behalf of Terra, presumably in cooperation with Divine Intervention.
This brief announcement was followed by mention of the contamination accident in a book, You Are Responsible!, published by The Aetherius Society in 1961, and there it sat for another 15 years, with no further mention outside certain secretive compartments in the CIA.
On November 4, 1976, an article, “Two Decades of Dissidence,” was published in the New Scientist magazine for its 20th anniversary issue. The author, Zhores A. Medvedev, a Soviet biologist, had gone into exile in London with his family in 1972 and gotten a job as senior research scientist at the National Institute for Medical Research. In his article, he mentioned that in 1957 or 1958 an explosive accident had contaminated a thousand square kilometers of territory in the Ural Mountains with radioactive debris. Hundreds of people were killed, thousands had to be evacuated, and the area would be a danger zone from now on. The New Scientist, aware of the stale claim by The Aetherious Society, proclaimed “Scooped by a UFO!” on a back page. Medvedev’s story was roundly denounced as “science fiction,” and was thrown into the same box with the Aetherions.
183
Nothing shuts down a chain reaction faster than boric acid in the coolant. The boron-10 nuclide absorbs thermal neutrons voraciously. There is a legend in nuclear engineering about some janitorial workers who were tasked with cleaning up the inside of an aluminum research reactor vessel. They did a marvelous job, making it sparkle and shine, but they used 20 Mule Team Borax as the detergent. The reactor never again achieved criticality, with the boron scrubbed into the inside surface of the vessel. It doesn’t take much.
184
I am expressing radiation doses received in the archaic “rem” notation to try to keep them in context with the earlier accidents. To convert to sieverts, or Sv, divide the rem by 100. Radiation levels, dosage, or exposure is expressed in many ways, on technical grounds, and this can make it difficult to simplify explanations of the effects of radiation on human beings. Please bear with me.
185
Why did the CIA keep this locked up? It may have just been a product of the secret mindset of intelligence organizations. Having big secrets was important to the CIA, but if everybody knew about it, it would not be a secret anymore. More likely it was fear that if information concerning an accidental, massive contamination of a large patch of populated territory was released to the public, there would be mass hysteria and a popular call to bring an end to nuclear power. This would ruin the careful campaign of the AEC to promote nuclear power, get it off the ground, and transfer it to the public sector. If so, this was a case of one government agency looking out for the welfare of another.
186
I would prefer to think that there was an earlier leak of the story, possibly in the Danish newspaper
187
UFO is an Air Force term, meaning Unidentified Flying Object, or an apparently controlled machine moving through the atmosphere that cannot be classified by type, country of origin, manufacturer, or serial number. The Aetherius Society is technically a “UFO religion,” in that it depends upon a belief in extraterrestrial entities operating UFOs. There are many such religions, the largest of which is Scientology.