Short Stuff: Hisashi Ouchi

Japanese nuclear worker Hisashi Ouchi is often called on the internet “the world’s most radioactive man.” That’s not exactly true, but it gets the point across about how severe the fatal dose of radiation he received was. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:04Josh Clark?

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• 1:13Josh Clark?

  Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry sitting in for Dave and this is short stuff, a really sad addition.

• 1:22Speaker 02

  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, what was the name of the town?

• 1:52Josh Clark?

  In Takaimura.

• 1:54Speaker 02

  Takaimura, okay, great.

• 1:56Josh Clark?

  Yeah, 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 fission 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 the kind of plant that produces fuel for nuclear plants.

• 2:32Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:48Speaker 02

  What I'm describing now is the approved procedure, actually.

• 2:51Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 2:51Speaker 02

  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?

• 3:14Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 3:15Speaker 02

  They said, all right, we're going to speed this up and this procedure is not approved. But what we want you guys to do is mix a solution in stainless steel buckets and then pour it directly into the precipitation tank.

• 3:29Josh Clark?

  And not only pour it directly in the precipitation tank, pour so much in there that we have like five to six times the approved amount in that precipitation tank at once, right?

• 3:41Speaker 02

  I think it's like seven times.

• 3:43Josh Clark?

  Okay, a lot, a lot more than was supposed to be in there. And I just wanted 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 one, 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 Hisashi 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 or kilograms that was allowed to be in there and they had 16.6, Chuck.

• 4:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, so that reached critical mass pretty quickly and started a 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.

• 4:46Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 4:46Speaker 02

  And it went on and off for about 20 hours until the emergency workers finally drained water from the tank's cooling jacket and then added boric acid to absorb the neutrons. But, you know, very sadly, Ouchi received a dose equivalent of 17 sieverts. 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 radioactive to other people or anything like that.

• 5:27Josh Clark?

  It's a little surprising to me, but okay, well, I'll take that. I did a little bit of Josh math here, Chuck.

• 5:34Speaker 02

  Oh, boy.

• 5:35Josh Clark?

  Well, it's not even Josh math, it's more Josh checking. So you said that Ouchi received 17 sieverts of radiation, right?

• 5:45Josh Clark?

  So.

• 5:45Speaker 02

  I'm not laughing at that, I'm laughing at your math, by the way.

• 5:48Josh Clark?

  No, I understand.

• 5:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:49Josh Clark?

  One milligram is equal to point 00001 sieverts. Okay?

• 5:56Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 5:57Josh Clark?

  You get 20 milligrams from a chest x ray. He got 17 sieverts all at once.

• 6:05Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 6:06Josh Clark?

  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.

• 6:21Speaker 02

  All right, we'll be right back.

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• 8:55Josh Clark?

  So Chuck, before we broke, I was saying I was surprised that he didn't die immediately.

• 8:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:59Josh Clark?

  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, um, to take effect. And, but what it did essentially was it blasted through every cell in Hisashi Ouchi's body and damaged the DNA inside, so much so that the doctors caring for him said that he, um, 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, uh, chromosomal structures throughout his body that weren't just totally messed up.

• 9:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, uh, we should mention there were three guys, um, in the immediate area. He was the one closest to the tank. Uh, there was another guy, um, a little less close to the tank. And then I guess the third guy, even less close to the tank. Um, Ouchi was taken to a local hospital at first, obviously, like very quickly, and then transferred to the National Institute of Radiological Sciences in Chiba. Uh, but then eventually would end up at the University of Tokyo Hospital for some really extensive specialized, uh, treatment. Specialized meaning like they had no roadmap for this, so they were kind of trying anything.

• 10:18Josh Clark?

  Exactly. They, uh, got in touch with his sister who was like, hey, um, he is not really able to produce new, uh, white blood cells. Basically any fast growing, fast regenerating cell, what it took the, the damage 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, um, and then his bone marrow that produces blood, 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

• 11:03Josh Clark?

  a bunch of white blood cells or not producing correct ones anymore. So they went to his sister and said, hey, can you, uh, donate some, some bone marrow? And she did.

• 11:13Speaker 02

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

• 11:52Josh Clark?

  Yep. So the guy who was second closest when that radiation blast went off, his name was Masato Shinahara, and he died from his, uh, injuries in 2000, April 2000. But about four months before, on December 21st, 1999, Hisashi Ouchi died at the University of Tokyo Hospital. And it had been 83 days since, uh, 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 grisliness of the whole thing. So everybody was like, how did this happen at all?

• 12:33Josh Clark?

  And they started looking at JCO and it turns out JCO was a terrible, terrible company that had no business, um, doing something as, as, um, important and, and, uh, dangerous as nuclear fuel production.

• 12:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure. Uh, that third worker survived, by the way, out of the three.

• 12:51Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 12:52Speaker 02

  But yeah, JCO had allowed a lot of shortcuts to happen. Um, like you said, those, the instructions just for this were, uh, that wasn't the approved procedure. There was not a lot of regulatory approval going on. Uh, the workers didn't have, um, safety training that they needed. Uh, the facility didn't have a critical incident alarm, which is crazy. Uh, they just, I guess they thought that like there wouldn't be that kind of accident there.

• 13:18Josh Clark?

  That's what happened to Three Mile Island, hubris.

• 13:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right. That same thing. Uh, they also weren't conducting the kind of inspections routinely that they needed to, uh, and that might've turned up like, hey, this process that we're using is like really unsafe and we should be using the approved process.

• 13:31Josh Clark?

  So I just want to point out, I think it's probably clear, but I just want to make a hundred percent 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?

• 13:50Speaker 02

  Yeah. So as far as the official, like, um, blame or whatever, the International Atomic Energy Agency, uh, said it was human error combined with, uh, serious breaches of safety principles. Uh, for JCO's part, they, uh, in 2003, six of the officials got suspended prison sentences for professional negligence. Uh, the company was fined and they couldn't, they, they had shut down the plant, didn't they?

• 14:16Josh Clark?

  They did. They would think it was the first time ever that a company lost its, um, license to, to enrich nuclear fuel in Japan.

• 14:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:25Josh Clark?

  And then also they were like, you know, these safety inspectors that didn't do the proper inspections that would've turned up that, uh, issue with the different procedure, um, they fell down too. So Japan really kind of bulked up its nuclear stuff and now everything's great.

• 14:41Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, you know, it exposed like what could happen. And, uh, 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?

• 14:56Josh Clark?

  Yeah. I think because in this case, JCO, uh, maybe wasn't powerful enough to try to fight having to change. So it did end up for the best.

• 15:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:06Josh Clark?

  Are you anything else?

• 15:07Speaker 02

  Uh, I got nothing else.

• 15:08Josh Clark?

  Well, then I say you give it to them.

• 15:11Speaker 02

  Short stuff is out.

• 15:15Speaker 03

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