Fukushima Watch: Former Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant Chief Dies
By Alexander Martin
The former head of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant has died from esophageal cancer, the plant’s operator said. He was 58.
- Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
- Masao Yoshida, former chief of Tokyo Electric Power's 9501.TO -0.90% Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, died of cancer on July 9, the operator said.
Tokyo Electric Power Co. announced that Masao Yoshida passed away in a Tokyo hospital Tuesday morning. Mr. Yoshida had been known for serving as the on-site crisis manager after the plant was hit by the March 11, 2011 earthquake and tsunami, triggering one of the biggest nuclear disasters in history.
He stepped down as head of the plant in December 2011 after being diagnosed with cancer, and had been under medical treatment after suffering a brain hemorrhage last July.
Mr. Yoshida assumed the manager’s post in June 2010 and was considered instrumental in preventing the disaster from worsening further when the plant was hit by a magnitude-9 earthquake and a giant tsunami, losing the capacity to cool its reactors and leading to severe damage to the reactor cores.
The Osaka native was known as a straight-talker unafraid of differences of opinion, and once ignored an order from Tepco headquarters to stop pumping seawater into a reactor. The decision was later praised as having prevented much more serious damage.
A Tepco spokesman said Mr. Yoshida had been exposed to approximately 70 millisieverts of radiation following the March 11 disaster, but cited his doctors as saying it would take at least five years for the effects of radiation to develop into a cancer.
“We believe that the possibility of radiation having had an effect on his illness was very low,” he said.
In a written statement posted on Tepco’s website, President Naomi Hirose said that as chief of the Fukushima Daiichi plant, Mr. Yoshida “brought the workers together and was literally prepared to die to respond to the accident.”
Naoto Kan, who was Japan’s prime minister when the Fukushima disaster took place, tweeted Tuesday that he was deeply saddened by Mr. Yoshida’s death. “I wish I had another chance to speak at length with him about the nuclear disaster,” he said.
Freelance journalist Ryusho Kadota, who wrote a book chronicling Mr. Yoshida and the efforts of others to contain the Fukushima disaster, reflected on his association with him in a blog entry. He recalled how during an interview last year, Mr. Yoshida told him that he believed the disaster would have expanded to a scale “10 times that of Chernobyl” if they hadn’t worked to prevent it from worsening.
No comments:
Post a Comment