On September 30th, 1999, Hisashi Ouchi, Masato Shinohara and Yutaka Yokokawa found themselves at the centre of Japan's worst nuclear accident. The events leading up to and following those critical seconds at 10:35AM that bright morning would conclude with two of them dying, one sentenced to prison and the fall from grace of the Japanese nuclear power industry.
But what actually happened is shrouded in lies and mystery, the voids of knowledge filled with fabrications to shock and scare. Tokaimura is by far controversial, with claims of human experimentation repeated across the Internet. This is not the case. This is the story of a government that failed its citizens, and the battle to save their lives among misguided hope.
Like many nuclear accidents of the past, the Tokaimura Criticality Accident was not a spontaneous event that occurred due to the mistakes of three men in a small room. The events that led to the accident began thirty years before Hisashi Ouchi, Masato Shinohara and Yutaka Yokokawa entered the Conversion Test Building. Mistakes by the management were made; mistakes by the Japanese government were made. And a major warning of the hazards of more than a decade of safety culture was created. Let us take a journey along this path and follow the countdown to Tokaimura.
