Short Stuff: Hisashi Ouchi

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Listen to she pivots on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. (upbeat music) Hey and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry sitting in for a day,

and this is short stuff. A really sad addition. Yeah, for sure, because this is about a nuclear accident, and one very famous victim of that accident, a man in Japan named Hisashi Ouchi,

who at the time was a 35-year-old worker at a nuclear facility, and he got a massive blast of radiation in 1999, it was called a criticality accident, and what was the name of the town?

Uh, in Takaimura. Takaimura, okay, great. Yeah, or no, Takaimura, sorry. And that's called the Takaimura nuclear accident, is what it's called.

And like you said, it was a criticality, because there wasn't like a nuclear explosion or anything like that. It was an uncontrolled nuclear-physion reaction that these guys accidentally created, while they were doing their job,

processing uranium oxide into usable uranium 235, fuel to be used in an actual nuclear reactor. This is not a nuclear plant. It was a kind of plant that produces fuel for nuclear plants. That's right.

This is the morning of September 30th, 1999, and what they specifically were doing in that moment was they were dissolving that uranium oxide, like you were saying. And this was the procedure,

what I'm describing now is the approved procedure, actually. Right. So they were supposed to have dissolved that uranium oxide in a geometrically safe vessel. And then what you end up with is urinal nitrite solution. And you put that into a buffer tank,

and then transfer, you know, little bits of that into a precipitation tank.

“This company, is it JCO, is the name of the company?”

Yeah. They said, alright, we're going to speed this up, and this procedure is not approved, but what we want you to guys to do is mix a solution in stainless steel buckets,

and then pour it directly into the precipitation tank. And not only pour it directly in the precipitation tank, pour so much in there that we have five to six times the approved amount in that precipitation tank at once, right? I think this is like seven times.

Okay, a lot more than was supposed to be in there. And I just want to point out, like you were saying, there was an approved procedure, and JCO said, nuts to that, we're going to do this faster. Right?

That's just what they were doing with their workers. It's crazy because this is nuclear uranium 235 fuel that they're making. And so when they put in these three workers, including Hishashi Ouchi, when they put in the seventh bucket

of this stuff into the directly in the precipitation tank, there were 16.6 kilos or 36.6 pounds of uranium in there, which is way more than was allowed to be in there. I think it was 2.4 keys for kilograms. That was allowed to be in there, and they had 16.6 Chuck.

Yeah, so that reach critical mass pretty quickly

and started self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction. And like you said, it wasn't like an explosion or anything like that, but it was a huge burst of neutron and gamma radiation, like incredible Hulk levels. Yeah.

And it went on and off for about 20 hours until the emergency workers finally drained water from the tank's cooling jacket,

But very sadly, Ouchi received a dose equivalent of 17 seabirds.

It's kind of hard to like get an exact calculation, but it was an incredibly large amount of radiation, like so much that they have, he's been called the most radioactive man in history, which is a bit of a misnomer because he had this burst of radiation, but it's not like he was walking around like radio active

to other people or anything like that. Well, it's not even Josh Math, it's more Josh checking.

“So you said that Ouchi received 17 seabirds of radiation, right?”

Yeah. So one thing of that, I'm laughing at your math, by the way. No, I understand. Yeah. One millerim is equal to 0.001 seabirds, okay?

Yeah. Yeah. So one millerim is equal to 0.001 seabirds. Okay? Yeah.

One millerim is equal to 0.001 seabirds. Okay? Yeah. You get 20 millerims from a chest X ray. He got 17 seabirds all at once.

Wow.

“Do you, I mean, that's just such a mind boggling amount of radiation that I can't”

believe he didn't die immediately. I say we take a break and come back and talk about Ouchi's agonizing 83 days of life that followed that radiation exposure. All right. We'll be right back.

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They all they're watching us, and they're watching me walk into there. And that is a moment that I will remember for the rest of my life. Listen, the left but not least with MCJ, on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. So, Chuck, before we broke, I was saying I was surprised that he didn't die immediately. Yeah.

The reason he didn't die immediately was because it takes a little while for the incredible damage

that the radiation did to his body to actually take effect. But what it did, essentially, was it blasted through every cell in Hesashi Ochi's body and damaged the DNA inside. So much so that the doctor's caring for him said that he had completely or the radiation had completely shattered his chromosomes. The actual packets that hold the DNA in your cells were just shattered. They couldn't find the chromosomal structures throughout his body.

That weren't just totally messed up. Yeah. We should mention there were three guys in the immediate area. He was the one closest to the tank. There was another guy, a little less close to the tank.

And then I guess a third guy, even less close to the tank. Ochi was taken to a local hospital at first, obviously, like very quickly. And then transferred to the National Institute of Radiological Sciences in Giba.

Specialized meaning like they had no road map for this. So they were kind of trying anything. Exactly. They got in touch with a sister who was like, hey, he is not really able to produce new white blood cells. Any fast growing, fast regenerating cell would it took the damage to the most.

And that's where it showed up first because those are the cells that are dividing.

And now that their DNA is messed up, they're dividing in all sorts of terrible ways. So the things that made up like the lining to his gut, those fast dividing cells. They started to show problems first, his skin. And then his bone marrow that produces white blood cells, red blood cells, all sorts of really important stuff. That was probably the biggest problem because he was very vulnerable to infection without a bunch of white blood cells.

Or not producing correct ones anymore.

“So they went to his sister and said, hey, can you donate some bone marrow and she did?”

Yeah. So you know, like I said, they were trying blood transfusions at first, stem cell transplants. And that's where his sister came into play. And initially it showed like that transplant produced some new white blood cells. But very quickly they started getting damaged.

And you know, basically in the same way he was just so riddled with it. And his skin and his intestinal lining couldn't regenerate normally. He had to constantly get fluids like replaced all throughout his body. He was on respiratory support. And like Oregon failure started to sit in.

Yeah. So the guy who was second closest when that radiation blast went off. His him was Massado, Shinohara. And he died from his injuries in 2000, April 2000. But about four months before on December 21st, 1999.

And Hesachiochi died at the University of Tokyo Hospital. And it had been 83 days since he had undergone that blast of radiation. And so of course this made really big news around Japan and around the world. Like this, this is nuts that anybody even lasted that long. Let alone just the grizzlyness of the whole thing. So everybody was like, how did this happen at all?

And they started looking at JCO and it turns out JCO was a terrible, terrible company that had no business. Doing something as important and dangerous as nuclear fuel production. Yeah, for sure. That third worker survived by the way out of the three. Yeah.

But yeah, JCO had allowed a lot of shortcuts to happen. Like you said, those the instructions just for this were that wasn't the approved procedure. There was not a lot of regulatory approval going on. The workers didn't have safety training that they needed.

The facility didn't have a critical incident alarm, which is crazy.

They just, I guess they thought that like there wouldn't be that kind of accident there.

“That's what happened to three mile island hubris.”

Yeah, that's right. That same thing. They also weren't conducting the kind of inspections routinely that they needed to. And that might have turned up like, hey, this process that we're using is like really unsafe. And we should be using the approved process. So I just want to point out, I think it's probably clear, but I just want to make 100% clear.

These three workers were not taking their own shortcut. They were doing the procedure that their company was telling them to, which was a dangerous shortcut. So the dangerous shortcut was official company procedure, right? Yeah. So as far as the official like Blamer, whatever, the international atomic energy agency, said it was human error combined with serious breaches of safety principles.

For JCOs part, they in 2003, six of the officials got suspended prison sentences for professional negligence. The company was fined and they couldn't, they had shut down the plant didn't they? They did. They think it was the first time ever that a company lost its license to enrich nuclear fuel in Japan. Yeah.

And then also they were like, you know, these safety inspectors that didn't do the proper inspections that were to turn up that issue with the different procedure. They fell down too. So Japan really kind of bulked up its nuclear stuff and now everything's great. Yeah. I mean, you know, it exposed like what could happen.

“And I think with every time we do something like this, like, it's like, they're very sad stories,”

but it seems like they come out on the other side with like, all right, now we're trying to do it right. Don't you think? Yeah.

I think because in this case, JCO, I've maybe wasn't powerful enough to try to fight having to change.

So it did end up for the best.

A young thing else. Uh, I got nothing else.

Well, I say you give it to him.

Short stuff is out.

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