Jumpers offered big money to brave N-plant

Up to $5,000 per day offered to jump into highly radioactive areas

 But it also sounds too outrageous to accept, given the full job description: working in perilously radioactive environments.

In its attempts to bring under control its radiation-gushing nuclear power plant that was severely damaged by last month’s massive earthquake and tsunami, Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) is trying to get workers even closer to the sources of stubborn radiation at the plant and end the world’s worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl.

Workers are reportedly being offered hazard pay to work in the damaged reactors of up to $5,000 per day—or more accurately, a fraction of a day, since the radiation-drenched shifts must be drastically restricted.

A TEPCO official said this week that the beleaguered company has tasks fit for “jumpers”—workers so called because they “jump” into highly radioactive areas to accomplish a job in a minimum of time and race out as quickly as possible.

Sometimes jumpers can make multiple runs if the cumulative dosage is within acceptable limits—although “acceptable” can be open to interpretation.

In cases of extreme leaks, however, the radiation might be so intense that jumpers can only make one such foray in their entire lives, or risk serious radiation poisoning.

For three weeks the reactors at TEPCO’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station, 240 km north of Tokyo, have been explosive cauldrons of hydrogen blasts, radioactive steam and contaminated water that has apparently run off into the ocean, where levels of radioactive iodine have been found at several thousand times the normal level in recent days.

TEPCO said 18 employees and three contractors were exposed to 100 millisieverts of radiation on Friday. The average dose for a nuclear plant worker is 50 millisieverts over five years.

TEPCO and its contractors are already trying to recruit jumpers, according to reports in the Japanese press.

“My company offered me 200,000 yen ($2,500) per day,” one subcontractor in Iwaki city about 40 km south of the crippled plant told the Weekly Post magazine.

“Ordinarily I’d consider that a dream job, but my wife was in tears and stopped me, so I declined,” said the unidentified worker who is in his 30s.

“The working time would be less than an hour, so in fact it was 200,000 yen an hour, but the risk was too big.”

Ryuta Fujita, a 27-year-old worker also from Iwaki said he was offered twice that amount as hazardous duty pay to venture into Fukushima Daiichi’s Reactor 2. But Fujita, who evacuated his 3-year-old son and 26-year-old wife to a shelter in a sports arena just outside Tokyo, said the 400,000 yen a day wasn’t worth it.

Workers reluctant

The reluctance of workers to enter the stricken plant highlights one of TEPCO’s basic dilemmas—it can’t get people close enough to see if its efforts to cool fuel rods are working; indeed, to confirm what the exact problems are in the first place. Most of its efforts have involved pouring water on exposed fuel rods in a bid bring down their temperature and rein in their toxic emissions.

What TEPCO needs is surgical-strike jumpers. Jumpers were common at US nuclear power stations in the 1970s and 1980s. “It is still a job that exists but it is much rarer than in the past,” said Rock Nelson, a manager at Nelson Nuclear Corp in Richland, Washington.

These days such jobs are more commonly performed by robots, but the interiors of Fukushima Daiichi’s mangled reactor buildings are so filled with debris that using robots is too difficult.

Some workers have said they feel they are being pressured to take the high-risk jobs at the plant.