In other cases, workers have been known to be employed by one contractor, while managed by another. Workers complained to one court that they had been packed in small rooms, given their daily bowls of rice and -- following a road accident, to get rid of their work uniforms and find separate hospitals to take care of them. And despite almost no oversight and widespread claims of gross rights violations, no company has yet been penalized.
A worker screened for radiation as he enters the emergency operation center at Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO)'s tsunami-crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Fukushima prefecture (Reuters/Issei Kato)
The lawyer for a group dedicated to protecting Fukushima workers' rights explained that they are "scared to sue because they're afraid they will be blacklisted ... You have to remember these people often can't get any other job."
Stories like the one Hayashi told have led to the emergence of worker rights' groups, such as the one he is now involved in. "Major contractors that run this system think that workers will always be afraid to talk because they are scared to lose their jobs," he explained, "but Japan can't continue to ignore this problem forever."
The revelations come on the heels of a string of mishaps at the troubled plant -- some natural, others caused by human error. The cleanup has a upcoming operation in November -- by far the riskiest to date. It will involve the extraction of 1,300 spent nuclear fuel rods from the cooling tanks suspended 18 meters above ground. The task will require absolutely precise coordination from all workers at the power plant, as each rod will be handled manually, not by a computer, as many of the rods are now tilted at an angle or not in their previous location.
Any mistake, or a failure to move the rods without collisions, could result in a catastrophe bigger than Chernobyl, says Christopher Busby, an expert on the health effects of ionizing radiation and Scientific Secretary of the European Committee on Radiation Risk. The combined radioactive yield of the fuel rods is more than that of the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
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