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US correspondents venture into nuclear no go zone

Brendan Trembath reported this story on Sunday, April 17, 2011 08:13:00

BRENDAN TREMBATH: While most correspondents are staying well away from the Fukushima region, two American reporters have weighed up the radiation risks and gone deep into the nuclear exclusion zone.

They drove through ghost towns right to the front gate of the stricken nuclear plant.

Earlier I spoke to one of them, Steve Herman, the north-east Asia bureau chief and correspondent for the Voice of America.

I asked him how the assignment came about.

STEVE HERMAN: Basically John Glionna of the Los Angeles Times and myself, we had gone into the exclusion zone on the previous day and found that it was possible to get in and that based on our readings on the dosimeters we thought it might be also not so risky to actually approach the Fukushima 1 nuclear power plant itself.

So we made a decision to try to do it.

BRENDAN TREMBATH: These dosimeters, they're the personal devices that people would probably be familiar with from hospitals to measure radiation levels. Just tell me a bit about those.

STEVE HERMAN: Okay, what we were wearing were Japanese-made dosimeters and what they're doing, they're not Geiger counters, they're measuring the accumulated dosage of radiation, and the ones we were wearing are digital so you could look down at the amount of time they had been on and they would give you the total exposure in millisieverts, which we converted to microsieverts because the levels were so small.

So the total exposure that we had from the point that we entered the 20 kilometre exclusion zone to the gate of the Fukushima 1 nuclear power plant and then back again, over a course of several hours, the reading was 12 microsieverts, that's micro, not milli, so it's quite a small dose of radiation.

BRENDAN TREMBATH: What would that equate to?

STEVE HERMAN: I think it's a few hours in an airliner, as best as we can tell. Now we're making the assumption that the dosimeters were accurate, and of course we had no way to know what sort of radioactive particles we might have been ingesting, but we were making the assumption that there was nothing too terrible that we were kicking up.

We did wear masks when we were very close to the plant and stayed inside the vehicle most of the time, although I did get out and take some photographs, but I thought it was a very low risk, compared especially to some of the other risks that correspondents typically undertake in trying to cover major news stories.

BRENDAN TREMBATH: What did you see once you were deep inside the zone?

STEVE HERMAN: Well we passed through the two towns closest to the nuclear power plant, which are Futaba and Okuma and unlike Namie which we had visited the day before where there were people in vehicles coming back in briefly to recover some personal items and then get back out as quickly as possible, we did not see any private individuals in either of those two towns, which were home to thousands of people, until March 11th.

It was obvious that people left very quickly, there was earthquake damage and then of course there had been the tsunami warning and then the evacuation order due to the radiation concerns. We saw swinging doors in businesses, vehicles that were parked at strange angles, like the drivers just quickly abandoned their cars. There was no signs of any people at any of the homes or businesses and unlike Namie there were no animals either.

These were ghost towns - something you would see like in a scene out of a science fiction movie.

We did see a few vehicles that were moving on the road that were either police or perhaps personnel that work at the nuclear power plant, they were dressed in hazmat suits and masks.

And then when we got to the gate, the main gate of the nuclear one Fukushima 1 nuclear power plant we were greeted, and perhaps greeted is the wrong word, by a couple of security guards who were dressed in the full hazmat outfits wearing yellow helmets and also wearing dual intake respirators.

We tried to communicate with them; they really didn't say anything to us at all and kept giving us the signal to make a U-turn.

BRENDAN TREMBATH: Did you have those respirators yourselves?

STEVE HERMAN: No we did not.

BRENDAN TREMBATH: Did you feel particularly worried at that point seeing that the people you were meeting, deep in the zone, had more protection?

STEVE HERMAN: Not really because we understood that this was their job to be outside all day long for many days in that environment and also that they were dressed that way perhaps due to the higher radiation levels that had been emanating from the plant in the early days of the disaster and also as a precaution in case there would be re-criticality of the spent fuel rods or reactor meltdown.

Obviously those events do occur during the brief time that we were there, we thought that was highly unlikely, but that was probably the biggest risk we faced. If we were that close and something dire happened at that point, then we would have obviously been exposing ourselves to potentially dangerous levels of radiation.

BRENDAN TREMBATH: Voice of America correspondent Steve Herman.


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