Masao Yoshida, Director of Fukushima Daichii Nuclear Plant, Has Died

Doofus writes "Masao Yoshida, director of the Daichii Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan, has passed away. Colleagues and politicos in Japan praised his disobedience during the post-tsunami meltdown and credited him with preventing much more widespread and intense damage. From the article: 'On March 12, a day after the tsunami, Mr. Yoshida ignored an order from Tepco headquarters to stop pumping seawater into a reactor to try and cool it because of concerns that ocean water would corrode the equipment. Tepco initially said it would penalize Mr. Yoshida even though Sakae Muto, then a vice president at the utility, said it was a technically appropriate decision. Mr. Yoshida received no more than a verbal reprimand after then-Prime Minister Naoto Kan defended the plant chief, the Yomiuri newspaper reported. "I bow in respect for his leadership and decision-making," Kan said Tuesday in a message posted on his Twitter account.'"

Comments

So a CEO tryed a mr burns I think in an emergency

[Joe_Dragon]

In an emergency the on site staff should full control over what is going on.

Blame Fukushima

[Russ1642]

Every case of cancer in Japan for the next 200 years is going to be blamed on Fukushima.

Re:Blame Fukushima

[Anonymous Coward]

Nuclear power isn't safe. It *could* be done safe, but not in a world of corporate greed and bought politicians and regulatory agencys.

Re:Blame Fukushima

[AmiMoJo]

Japan has a long history of anti-nuclear movements. Like most of the world it went off the technology when it turned out to be insanely expensive in the late 70s and 80s, but even in the hayday of the 50s and 60s there was a strong anti-nuclear movement.

The cost of Fukushima has destroyed any hope of nuclear power ever being economical in Japan. No-one trusts TEPCO to run plants any more, no-one wants to invest in new nuclear, even energy companies don't want to take on the risk. What shareholder would back something that might ultimately destroy all profits and nationalize the company?

Re:Blame Fukushima

[rossdee]

"It *could* be done safe"

But not 100% safe on the coast of Japan which is subject to large earthquakes and tsunamis

Re:Blame Fukushima

[citylivin]

"clean relatively safe nuclear power."

I don't think I would consider "safe" any industry where an accident or malpractice could result in a place being uninhabitable for 10,000 - 100,000 years. It is immoral to saddle future generations with this burden, however slight you perceive the risk to be.

Nuclear apologists need to wake up. Human error is always going to be a problem. Untill the world gets its act together and starts deploying more CANDU type reactors which by design cannot meltdown, I for one will still fight against nuclear power.

You have an industry that deploys proven flawed designs from 40-60 years ago, and then runs the plants way longer than recommended lifetimes. The way the world currently does nuclear power, more accidents are inevitable.

Re:Blame Fukushima

[ericloewe]

100% safety is impossible anywhere.

Fukushima would've been a non-issue as well if the backup generators had actually been logically placed.

Re:Blame Fukushima

[loshwomp]

Untill the world gets its act together and starts deploying more CANDU type reactors which by design cannot meltdown, I for one will still fight against nuclear power.

The right time to fight against nuclear power is the day after the last coal plant shuts down, because back in the real world, when nuclear shuts down, coal replaces it (immediately!) nearly 1 for 1, and coal kills many, many more people even when it is working nominally. (Coal generation also releases much more radiation into the atmosphere.)

Alternative energy proponents: Save it. I love 'em, too, and I back that up with the 7 kW of thermal and photovoltaics on my roof, but it doesn't change the fact that coal (and gas) are what ramp up (in real time) when nukes shut down. Examples abound.

Germany? Building new coal plants as it blathers about shutting down the nukes.

Japan? Partially made up for their nuclear shortfall with conservation (good!) but mostly with increased imports of coal (and especially LNG, brought to you by fracking).

Now that the last San Onofre units are offline, California will be compensating (forever) with additional coal and natural gas generation.

Re:Blame Fukushima

[AmiMoJo]

Germany using more coal and gas has nothing to do with the shut down of nuclear plants. It is all to do with the very good feed-in tariffs for renewables making it hard for power companies to compete. They stop trying to use more expensive but cleaner forms of energy, including the remaining nuclear plants, and instead go for the cheapest options which are goal and gas.

Renewables currently make up about 40% of Germany's energy mix, and 40% of that is individuals with solar PV. It's really impressive how much they have done in so little time, and it's because the feed-in tariffs really make investing in your own clean energy attractive. During a peak last year they got up to 60% purely renewable energy for a few hours, and power companies were actually having to pay to dump energy into the grid because they were producing too much. Germany also exports a lot of. energy.

During this transition, which will last until about 2022, there is going to be more carbon emissions from coal and gas plants. At the end of it though Germany will be a majority renewable supply country and the need for coal and gas will be reduced to lower levels than before the nuclear shut-down. It takes time for the grid to be upgraded to support this, and it takes time for new forms of cleaner energy to come online. It's a huge project, but Germany is leading the world in many respects and will be the one making huge profits by exporting the technology and know-how in the next few decades.

Re:Blame Fukushima

[AmiMoJo]

Nope. Turns out that the earthquake damaged the cooling system so even with power it may not have worked. At the time they did actually get emergency cooling system on to the site but they failed to work because due to the damage caused by the tsunami they failed to notice that a bleed-off valve on the coolant pipe was open. They pumped in a lot of water with fire engines but most of it ended up in storage tanks instead of the reactor, leading to the eventual hydrogen explosions.

Re:Tepco

[K. S. Kyosuke]

If you want to make the preposterous claim that Yoshida's esophageal cancer was induced by the radiation released in the Fukushima incident, fine, go ahead, make a fool of yourself. His cancer went symptomatic mere months after the incident, which is a timeframe that makes it all but certain that the neoplastic changes leading to the malignant growth in his esophagus had been going on for years before that and that the timing is mere coincidence. Although there have been cases of fast-acting radiation-induced cancer, such cases are associated with massive doses of radiation leading to severe acute radiation poisoning, which, AFAIK, he hadn't experienced (from what I know, only two workers were treated for acute radiation poisoning, and he was not one of them), and the fast-acting cancer usually happens to be leukemia (and it takes at least year and two to develop anyway, not months), whereas other kinds of tumors (hint! Hint! Esophageal cancer!) take something like ten years to develop, at the minimum.

Re:Still no deaths

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, because the US Navy's nuclear propulsion program and France's government run nuclear power program have had SO many problems...

Wake up, the only way to SAFELY run a reactor is to put operational safety ahead of making money. Ironically you will probably make more money that way...

Re:Esophageal Cancer

[Charliemopps]

What TFS doesn't mention was that he died of esophageal cancer. And he got it after nine months of being at the power plant after the accident.

TEPCO claims the cancer is not related to the accident. Of course they would.

Because it's not. Cancer takes a long time to show up (decades) unless it's leukemia, which isn't what he had. If the works are going to start dieing from cancer (which they very well might) it'll start happening around 2020

Re:Esophageal Cancer

[sjames]

Medical facts are on their side. You simply cannot go from cancer free to death by esophageal cancer in this timeframe. That means he was already developing it before the tsunami.

Re:Esophageal Cancer

[h4rr4r]

And you claim they are related?

Let's see some evidence.

Re:So a CEO tryed a mr burns I think in an emergen

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you ever thought about the possibility, that there are some people visiting slashdot, whose native language is NOT english?
And take that a bit further. Have you ever thought about the possibility, that such people MAY NOT be speaking english perfectly? ...or am I feeding a troll again?

Re:from the somebody's gonna say it dept:

[sjames]

So you allege that a bizarre accident involving a paper clip, a fuel rod, and a tsunami transported undetectable ghost radiation back in time and deposited it in his esophagus?

Re:Tepco

[Megane]

Furthermore, Japan loves to smoke. And this is one of the cancers that you can get from smoking.

A little google-fu turned up this article which shows that he was most definitely a smoker:

He recalled in the interview often passing out cigarettes to workers in a heavily used smoking room beside the bunker during the disaster and once joked: “We don’t have the US army fire trucks we need but at least we have got smokes.” Fukushima boss Masao Yoshida breaks silence on disaster -- The Australian

Re:Tepco

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Fuckyoushima may not have been the origin of his cancer, but it probably accelerated the disease.

If that is the case, it's much more likely that the suppression of his immunity system's ability to fight cancer was a result of psychological stress (which he was exposed to) associated with the incident and the government's meddling into his culpability, rather than a result of acute radiation poisoning (which he didn't experience anyway).

I know it's all fun and games here

[kaizendojo]

But what he did was heroic. Especially in a society that empahsizes respect for superiors. In the US, we wouldn't think twice about second guessing a higher up if we thought there was an inherent risk but this is almost unheard of in the Asian culture. Anata ni keii, Yoshida-san.

Re:I know it's all fun and games here

[slew]

But what he did was heroic. Especially in a society that empahsizes respect for superiors. In the US, we wouldn't think twice about second guessing a higher up if we thought there was an inherent risk but this is almost unheard of in the Asian culture. Anata ni keii, Yoshida-san.

I find it ironic that often the celebrated hero of most stories is the singular person who undertakes the final risky, but ultimatly successful course of action to save the day in a tragic situation, where real unsung heros would be the many folks who make the sacrifices necessary to plan for and/or mitigate the tragic situations before they happen.

Maybe this obsession for hollywood-style heros is why no heroes ever emerged that would have fought for emergency diesel supplies, or higher seawalls that might have prevented or reduced the scale of this disaster. Such heroes would likely have paid a big price for their second guessing and their sacrifice would likely have gone unrecognized.

Re:I know it's all fun and games here

[drolli]

> In the US, we wouldn't think twice about second guessing a higher up

Obviously you have *not* read the report on the TMI incident

Re:I know it's all fun and games here

[slew]

The irony is that as director, he's likely to have been in the position to push for emergency generators safeguards (although maybe perhaps not the seawall as that happened during construction), but not having done so, he essentially created the situation for which he was deemed a hero.

Perhaps he might have actually sacrificed some of his political brownie points with the Tepco upper management before this tsunami occurred and secured the funds/resources to build better protection for the generators (protected fuel source, waterproof batteries, etc). By towing the party line until the point of criticality, he's the hero, but the ultimate situation may have been of his own making... Which is why I called it ironic.

Re:Tepco

[compro01]

Besides, esophageal cancer is so common in old men of 58 years.

Yes, esophageal cancer is very common in old men of 58 years who smoke like chimneys.

Re:Still no deaths

[AmiMoJo]

What is this bizarre obsession with deaths as the only meaningful statistic? The same thing applies to evaluating war it seem. Ignore the huge numbers of people injured, often cripplingly, and ignore the huge cost. Deaths are the only metric.

Also, in the case of Fukushima the government wasn't running the show, TEPCO was.