Asahi Shimbun/EPA/Keystone Press
Like most office workers in Japan, when the massive earthquake hit Friday afternoon, Dan Ayotte ducked under his desk as light fixtures and filing cabinets smashed to the floor around him. “It sounded like a train, it just kept getting more intense,” says the Peterborough, Ont., native. “I thought I was never going to see my family again.”
But Ayotte wasn’t just another terrified cubicle dweller in a swaying Tokyo skyscraper. As a mechanical technician with GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy Canada, Ayotte had spent the past three months working on one of the reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. It was a position that put him front and centre for the full devastation the quake was about to unleash. (General Electric designed the plant’s reactors and is a partner with Hitachi in the nuclear industry.)
When the violent shakes finally ended after five long minutes, Ayotte and a co-worker drove down to the edge of the sea. Along the way, they passed gaping cracks in the road so wide they’d swallowed trucks. All around, landslides snapped trees like matchsticks. Then Ayotte saw it, stretching across the horizon in the distance—a wall of water nine metres high, roaring straight toward the plant and its six reactors. The pair spun their car around and raced to a lookout point on a cliff high above the facility. What Ayotte witnessed next left him stunned. The first wave hit nearby cliffs with such force that dirt and debris exploded into the air “like it was hit with an artillery shell.” A fishery plant down by the water’s edge was swept away in seconds. And then the waves began to pound the plant and its reactors. “The nuclear plant took the full brunt of that first wave,” he says. “The water rolled right over the southern part of the station.”
What Ayotte didn’t know then, and what the world would only begin to learn hours later, was that the twin assaults of earthquake and tsunami had set off a cascading chain of events leading to the worst nuclear crisis in a generation. The emergency situation was only made worse by a conspiracy of hubris and denial among Japanese officials and nuclear industry proponents who couldn’t fathom that the country’s reactors and containment systems might fail. Yet early assurances that everything was under control soon gave way to the realization the reactors were at risk of suffering a catastrophic meltdown. As the full scale of the potential horror revealed itself—punctuated by images of workers clad head to toe in protective gear screening babies for radiation exposure—hard questions about the future of nuclear energy began to emerge, both inside and outside Japan.
As the crisis unfolds over the coming days and even weeks, Ayotte, like the rest of the world, will be watching closely from the safety of his home. His employer evacuated his crew the day after the quake hit, and he arrived back in Toronto on Sunday. After the events of the past week, he says he’s officially retired now. But his thoughts remain with the people suffering in Japan. “That plant is devastated, and the country will be years before it rebuilds,” he says. “It looks like a war zone over there.”
Events were still developing fast as Maclean’s went to print late Tuesday night EDT. After a series of hydrogen explosions and fires at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, three reactors had suffered at least partial meltdowns and radiation levels in the immediate vicinity spiked to dangerous levels. (At another nearby plant that had also suffered damage from the quake and tsunami, Fukushima Daini, operators had succeeded in cooling down all four reactors.) There were also reports that steam was rising from one of the reactors, though the source was unknown. But even as Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), which runs the plants, raced to bring the reactors under control, a far greater threat was emerging. An explosion occurred by a pool containing spent fuel rods, and water in the pool was boiling off. If the rods, which though “spent” remain radioactive and dangerously hot, become exposed, they could ignite and emit clouds of radioactive smoke directly into the atmosphere. The government was considering a daring mission that would see military helicopters pour water on the pool to keep the rods submerged. More than 200,000 people living near the plants have been evacuated.
