Meltdown: Day 2

More than 400,000 people were without homes. Many were stranded on rooftops and hills, surrounded by the water and wreckage left behind by the tsunami.

The earthquake had caused much of the coast to sink, and water remained trapped in many towns, turning them into lakes. In others, the water had already retreated, leaving behind a thick jumble of mangled cars, destroyed boats, and crumbled buildings.

Usuzawa, who helped out as a greeter at the evacuation center, remembered the grim accounting that the survivors went through in the days following the wave: “Someone asks you,...‘How about your family, was everyone safe?’ and you respond, ‘Yes, we are all okay,’ but then you ask them ‘How about you?’ and they say something like, ‘We had a family of five but now we are three…’ All I could do was hug them.”

Fire stations, police stations, and municipal centers had been carried away with everything else.

Under normal conditions, the zirconium does its job well, reinforcing the sturdy rods without getting in the way of zinging neutrons. But zirconium has one drawback: At extremely high heat, it reacts with steam.

That reaction produces potentially explosive hydrogen gas—lots of it—and Fukushima Daiichi had passed that temperature threshold hours before.

The torus, or suppression pool, sits like a giant hollow doughnut below the reactor vessel. When pressure in the reactor gets too high, a safety valve opens and allows steam to escape into the torus, where it condenses back into water.

Steam that passes through the torus is scrubbed of most of its radioactive isotopes before it leaves the building, a vast improvement over allowing the steam to enter the environment without any intervention.

To reduce the danger of health effects that might appear later, they opted for older volunteers.

Still, when Takeyuki Inagaki, a maintenance manager, asked for volunteers for the dangerous job, many young workers raised their hands.

It would be a grueling task, so they selected workers who they thought were strong enough to complete it successfully and divided them into teams of three.

Superintendent Yoshida told his team they would need to be ready to vent by 9:00 A.M. But they weren’t idle in the hours before then.

Overnight, other response teams had been formed to clean up debris so workers could get to the reactor buildings, and to set up vital systems to get power and water to them.

One of the teams had labored throughout the night to lay a high-voltage cable that could carry electricity to units 1 and 2 from an electrical truck.

He knew that, in order to protect his surviving daughter from the radiation the plant might release, he had to abandon the faint sliver of hope that one of those swept away could have survived.

Many faced the same stark decision: Staying would endanger their health and that of others who had escaped the tsunami. But evacuating meant abandoning their plans to search through the rubble for loved ones who might still be alive.

Residents in the towns of Futaba and Okuma, as well as nearby Namie and Tomioka, clambered onto buses bound for towns farther inland.

Jin Ishido, who was in charge of crisis management for the town of Okuma, remembers: “It was complete chaos. We were not prepared. We had no protection, no protective gear, no experts. Our communication lines were disrupted… We didn’t have contingency plans for hospitals—even the firefighters didn’t have a plan.”

At the Futaba hospital, 209 patients and the hospital staff prepared to evacuate. Finding buses to move them out proved a monumental task.

But 130 patients who were confined to their beds, as well as 98 residents of a nursing home who could not be moved, were left behind without staff to care for them.

As they entered the basement, the sound of the steam thundering into the suppression pool was overwhelming.

One worker took a tentative step.
His shoes melted.

A team member’s dosimeter indicated that he had already been exposed to the maximum amount of radiation he was allowed to receive in a year.

In reality, the pressure may have been going down for a far more ominous reason: At the top of the containment structure is a heavy steel lid that can be opened for reactor maintenance.

In an instant, the molecules surrounding the spark burst into flame. In just a few milliseconds more, the heat had raced through all of the gas in the building, setting it alight.

Superheated air leaped outward in a thundering explosion, shredding the walls of the reactor building and sending a cloud of white smoke and debris billowing into the air.

“Things looked distorted to me for a moment. Then I felt as if I was floating at the same time as [I heard] a tremendous roaring sound... I was showered with rubble from in front like a rocket.”

The “rubble” that rained down on the workers was probably pieces of the steel sheeting that had surrounded the reactor building.

Debris from the explosion reached even farther afield, showering stragglers from the evacuation of Futaba.

Debris from the explosion reached even farther afield, showering stragglers from the evacuation of Futaba.