NARAHA, Japan - The utility that runs Japan's tsunami-crippled nuclear station says conditions for thousands of workers there have improved significantly -- although it may take decades to safely close the facility. To show off the progress, it allowed media into the plant's main staging area Friday for the first time.
The safety of the workers has been a major concern since the crisis began on March 11, when the plant was devastated by a huge tsunami that touched off meltdowns and explosions. At one point, radiation leaks forced all but a few dozen of the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant's workers -- dubbed the Fukushima 50 -- to evacuate.
Work inside the facility, which a government panel this month announced will likely take 30 years or more to safely decommissioned, continues to be extremely risky.
But officials with the Tokyo Electric Power Co. -- better known as TEPCO -- say the plant has now stabilized enough to allow up to 3,300 workers onto the facility each day. Over the past several months, they have restored its cooling systems to keep the reactors at a fairly low and constant temperature, repaired damaged buildings and machinery and conducted decontamination tasks.
"We are doing all we can to bring this crisis to an end," said TEPCO spokesman Yoshimi Hitosugi. He said TEPCO had determined that the situation at the plant had improved enough for it to open the "J-Village" staging area on Friday and allow representatives of the Japanese and international media into the plant itself on Saturday.
"We believe it is important to be transparent," Hitosugi said.
Work within the plant remains risky because of the large amount of radioactive material -- most of it released in the first week or two -- that spewed from the four reactors that suffered the most damage. The Fukushima Dai-ichi plant has six reactors, but two were shut down when the tsunami hit. Three of the reactors that were operating went into meltdown.
Fearing it would run out of workers able to repair the plant, Japan more than doubled their allowable exposure limits. The government considered raising the limit further, but the discussion abated as the initial critical situation eased. No workers have died from radiation exposure, though some have registered over the allowable annual limit.
TEPCO has acknowledged it was not sufficiently prepared for the nuclear crisis, the worst since Chernobyl in 1986.
It did not have enough protective gear or exposure-measuring dosimeters to ensure the safety of the work crews it desperately needed to keep the facility from deteriorating out of control.
That lack of preparation was particularly evident at the makeshift emergency staging ground TEPCO established to deal with the crisis from J-Village, a sprawling, grassy sports complex in this town on the edge of the 20-kilometre exclusion zone around the plant.
In the early stages of the crisis, workers were forced to sleep on the floor -- if they could sleep at all -- and eat canned foods. TEPCO says the workers now have ample supplies, sleep in prefabricated housing, eat in cafeterias and have less-punishing schedules. Decontamination and radiation screening facilities have also been substantially bolstered.
The former training facility for national-level soccer teams still appears much like a military base.
Its 12 soccer fields are now landing grounds for helicopters, or parking areas for heavy equipment and emergency vehicles. Some 480,000 sets of protective gear -- which can only be worn once and are then considered contaminated -- remain stored on the J-Village grounds. A clock near a dormitory remains stopped at 2:46 p.m. -- the moment the initial quake hit.
"The environment here has gotten much better than it was," said Toshiro Iinuma, 56, a supervisor who has worked the plant for 39 years with one of TEPCO's subcontractors. "I think it is much more stable. But we have a long road ahead. We still don't know exactly what to expect."
