An accident is often defined as an unforeseeable event. Where the massive irradiation of fifty-odd workers at the Japan Nuclear Fuels Conversion Company’s (JCO) uranium processing plant at Tokaimura is concerned, nothing could be further from the truth. JCO is a subsidiary of Sumitomo Metal Mining Co, a huge multinational whose interests include copper and gold mines in Chile, the United States and Australia. That in turn is part of the Sumitomo group, whose net turnover totalled $94 billion in the 1999 tax year. The Tokaimura facility is sited in a densely populated urban area, 110 km from Tokyo.

In a previous incident in 1997, 37 of the company’s workers were exposed to radiation. The accident which happened on 1 October 1999 was even worse: two of the three most directly exposed workers are in a life-threatening condition, five more soaked up doses above the legal annual exposure limit of 50 mSv, and the full extent of the damage to the population is still unknown. Members of the emergency services (fire crews, nurses, etc...) were not told they were dealing with a nuclear accident, and were also exposed to high-level radiation.
Accident investigators’ early findings show up the initial claims that it was due to human error as laughable and disingenuous. Instead of an automated, controlled transfer of uranium into a nitric acid bath, JCO made its workers carry the liquefied uranium and pour it into the tank from stainless-steel buckets. The recipitation tank ended up filled with 16 kg of uranium (instead of its maximum 2.4 kg). The work method was used because it was quicker and cheaper. The survey disclosed that JCO had two sets of operating manuals. One which met legal standards and was shown to factory inspectors, the other containing the instructions really given to workers, putting profit before safety. It has also emerged that one of the workers directly involved in the accident had been on the job for barely two months, and none had been given proper training.

Employers’ bids for huge swathes of self-regulation fall down on the fact that private profit is at cross-purposes with the health and safety of workers and the public. The Tokaimura disaster also points up the shortcomings of inspection and enforcement systems, focussed on checking documents supplied by the firm rather than what happens on the factory floor. While this disaster clearly puts a wider-ranging debate about nuclear energy onto the agenda, we believe it also shows the importance of having detailed, properly policed and effectively enforced public rules, and challenges the pretence that big multinationals have built health and environmental protection into their business strategies.

Sources: report by the Citizens' Nuclear Information Center in Japan and articles in Le Monde, Il Manifesto and El País.