Blame aimed at Japan's leaders

• Aftermath: Police looking into whether negligence led to leak.
  By Sarah Lubman Mercury News Staff Writer

  TOKYO -- With Japan's most serious nuclear accident in history under control, fear turned to anger today over the government's admittedly tardy response to a radiation leak at a uranium-processing plant.

  ``We seem to be using nuclear power so irresponsibly,'' grumbled Yasuko Tsuchiya, 65, a swimming instructor at a Tokyo health club. ``I'd like to see them get it right. And the government was so slow to act, but this is Japan -- it's always that way. If this happened in Taiwan, they'd get right on it.''

  Government officials delayed action on Thursday's leak in Tokaimura, about 70 miles northeast of Tokyo, because they didn't initially realize how serious it was, Chief Cabinet Secretary Hiromu Nonaka admitted at a Friday news conference. Although the leak happened at 10:35 a.m. Thursday, the government didn't set up a task force to address it until around 9 that night.

  The emerging public response to such confessions is a blend of resignation and contempt.

  ``The prime minister could have heard about the accident a little earlier than he did but he was out to lunch -- literally,'' the Mainichi News wrote in a scathing editorial. The paper said ``bureaucratic bungling'' prevented Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi from learning of Japan's first-ever critical nuclear accident until about two hours after it took place. Other papers called for tougher inspections and better preparation.

  ``It's obvious that measures to both avoid the accident and deal with it were insufficient,'' the Asahi News wrote, citing a senior plant official who said the Tokaimura plant had never anticipated a so-called criticality accident. Criticality refers to a state of self-sustaining nuclear fission.

  The number of people exposed to dangerously high levels of radiation after three workers bungled a fuel-mixing process rose to 69, according to the latest Japanese reports. Two of the three workers are in critical condition, and more than a dozen people were exposed when they went into the facility in three-minute shifts to put a stop to the spontaneous nuclear chain reaction.

  Tsutomo Hashimoto, 50, a Tokyo lawyer on his way to work, said Japanese officials should communicate more with the public. ``They're slow to respond and they try to cover things up, that's the sense I get,'' he said of Japan's notoriously bureaucratic government. ``They shouldn't try to keep things to themselves.''

  Police in Ibaraki prefecture, where the plant is located, are investigating whether criminal negligence and ``serious mismanagement'' led to the leak.

   

  First leak in Japan

  Although the incident was the first time members of the Japanese public had been exposed to radiation leaked from a nuclear facility, international regulators said it wasn't as severe as two previous accidents in the former Soviet Union and the United States. They rated the Tokaimura mishap as a 4 on a scale of zero to 7, with Chernobyl being 7 and Three Mile Island a 5.

  The accident occurred in an experimental station separate from the main building that did not employ such common protective measures as glove boxes, automation or remote-controlled systems, the director of JCO's Tokyo system said at a news conference Thursday. Instead, workers sometimes blended solutions and conducted other operations by hand near a settling basin. JCO said it has a work manual explaining preventive measures, though plant officials could not say whether all workers were familiar with procedures and safeguards.

  Plant officials said the chain reaction, which sent radiation levels soaring thousands of times higher than normal Thursday night, was set off when a worker used too much uranium while making fuel used to generate nuclear power. Three workers had been mixing uranium with nitric acid to make fuel for the nearby Joyo fast-breeder reactor. Today's papers carried pictures of the grimy-looking tank at the heart of the accident.

  Senior officials at JCO Co., which runs the plant, have publicly acknowledged fault. They said plant employees had skipped an essential step in the mixing process, possibly to save work. Police interviewed several senior JCO officials Friday for more information about the cause of the accident.

  One JCO official said workers skipped normal procedures and used a stainless steel container normally used for cleaning to transfer 35 pounds of uranium -- about seven times the safe maximum level -- into a basin. The three workers saw a ``blue flash'' and immediately became ill.

  Two are in critical condition and have lapsed in and out of consciousness from effects of the radiation, estimated at about 4,000 times the level considered safe in one year, a hospital official said.

  Two of the three workers reportedly had very little experience with the mixing procedure, and one had never done it before. Among those exposed to high levels of radiation were three ambulance workers who ferried the three severely exposed plant employees to the hospital.

  As the sense of crisis ebbs, Tokaimura residents have begun to complain about a lack of urgency by local authorities. Nearly 70 percent of 100 Tokaimura residents polled by NHK Television said notification was too slow, with one in five residents learning of the disaster more than two hours after it happened. Village officials evacuated about 150 people living within a quarter-mile radius of the plant, seven of whom had been exposed to radiation.

  Tokaimura officials Thursday advised more than 310,000 people living within six miles of the plant to stay indoors, but that advisory was lifted Friday afternoon after radiation levels were deemed back to normal. Masaru Hashimoto, the governor of Ibaraki prefecture, said at a news conference that officials had analyzed vegetables grown in two villages near the plant and found them safe.

  Both JCO and its corporate parent, Sumitomo Metal Mining Co., issued apologies. But that did little to reassure Tokaimura families such as the Shibatas, who took turns staying up all night Thursday to keep an eye on the news.

  Feeling cut off

  ``I was really worried,'' Sachiko Shibata told NHK. ``We were told to stay indoors. But when the kids asked why they couldn't go outside, I didn't know how to explain it to them.'' The Shibatas kept their windows closed, as instructed, but found themselves briefly cut off from the world after local telephone lines bogged down from an avalanche of worried callers.

  Television footage from Tokaimura showed eerily empty streets and residents lining up to get checked for radiation in the local city hall. At the Mito Red Cross Hospital south of Tokaimura, more than 1,000 people streamed in to be checked for radiation exposure.

  The nuclear reaction at the plant was contained after JCO sent 16 workers to the scene early Friday morning. Working in three-minute shifts, the workers tried to open a valve to release cooling water around the tank where the reaction occurred, a necessary step to prevent further nuclear fission. But opening the valve didn't let the water out, and the plant workers finally had to break a pipe.

  Japan's most recent nuclear accident was the latest in a string of mishaps that have raised public anxieties over nuclear power, a key source of energy for the island nation. Japan is so poor in natural resources that it relies on the atom for about a third of its electrical power.

  The country's fast-breeder program has been controversial since a 1995 sodium leak at a prototype facility in Fukui prefecture. The facility was shut down. In 1997, there was a fire and explosion at a state-run reprocessing plant at Tokaimura that contaminated at least 35 workers with minor radiation.

  ``This is going to have an impact,'' said Yoshio Hatanaka, a retired chemist on his way back to Tokyo from a conference in San Francisco. ``Any nuclear plant that wants to expand is going to have trouble. This is going to raise new fears about the safety of nuclear power.''

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