Caravan of calamity - nuclear gypsies Japan's dirty secret

This was published 9 years ago

Caravan of calamity - nuclear gypsies Japan's dirty secret

By John Glionna

NAMIE, Japan: Kazuo Okawa's luckless career as a ''nuclear gypsy'' began one night at a poker game.

The year was 1992 and jobs were scarce in this farming town in the shadow of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. An unemployed Mr Okawa gambled and drank a lot.

Ready for the clean-up ... temporary workers at the Fukushima nuclear plant are said to face higher radiation doses than power company staff.


He was dealing cards when a stranger made him an offer: manage a crew of unskilled workers at the nearby plant. ''Just gather a team of young guys and show up at the front gate; I'll tell you what to do,'' instructed the man, who Mr Okawa later learnt was a recruiter for a local job subcontracting firm.

Mr Okawa did not know the first thing about nuclear power, but he figured, what could go wrong.

He became what is known in Japan as a ''jumper'' or ''nuclear gypsy'' for the way he moved between various nuclear plants.

Such unskilled contractors exist at the bottom rung of Japan's employment ladder, subjecting themselves to perilous doses of radioactivity.

Solicited from day labour sites across the country, many contractors are told little of the task ahead.

After an earthquake-triggered tsunami deluged the Fukushima plant in March, a disaster that cascaded into reactor core melt-downs, activists have begun calling for better government regulation of what they call the nuclear industry's dirtiest secret.

For decades, they say, atomic plants have maintained a two-tiered workforce: one made up of highly paid and well-trained utility employees, and another of contractors with less training and fewer health benefits.


Last year, 88 per cent of the 83,000 workers at the nation's 18 commercial nuclear power plants were contract workers, according to Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, a government regulator.

A study by the Citizens' Nuclear Information Centre, a Tokyo watchdog group, found that contractors last year accounted for 96 per cent of the harmful radiation absorbed by workers at the nation's nuclear power plants.

Temporary workers at the Fukushima plant in 2010 also faced radiation levels 16 times higher than employees of the plant's owner-operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company, because contractors are called in for the most dangerous work.

''This job is a death sentence, performed by workers who aren't being given information about the dangers they face,'' said Hiroaki Koide, an assistant professor at Kyoto University's research reactor institute.

Mr Okawa, who was not working the day of the tsunami, immediately quit the job at the plant and the ''suicidal work'' he was performing there: mopping up leaks of radioactive water, wiping down ''hot'' equipment and filling drums with contaminated nuclear waste.

He described an unofficial pecking order at most nuclear plants among contractors, with the greenest workers often assigned the most dangerous jobs until they got enough experience to question the work or a newer worker came along.

Mr Okawa, 56, said contractors knew they faced being laid off once they reached exposure limits, so many switched off radiation-measuring devices. ''Guys needed the work, so they cut corners,'' he said. ''The plant bosses knew it but looked the other way.''

Now the Fukushima plant needs its temporary workers more than ever, to help engineers shut down the stricken reactors for good. The ''gypsies'' are being paid salaries several times higher than before the accident, said Mr Okawa, who said he was offered $US650 a day to return to work at Fukushima.

After the Fukushima disaster, the government raised the annual limit for allowable radiation exposure from 200 millisieverts to 250 for nuclear plant workers.

The United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation has warned that exposure to just 30 millisieverts a year can cause cancer.

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