Doctors were astounded when Hisashi Ouchi arrived at the University of Tokyo Hospital after being exposed to the highest level of radiation ever experienced by a human.
The 35-year-old technician at the nuclear power plant had nearly no white blood cells, meaning he had no immune system. He would soon start gushing blood as his flesh melted.
At the nuclear power facility in Tokaimura, Japan, the nuclear disaster started before noon on September 30, 1999.
The Japan Nuclear Fuel Conversion Co. (JCO) ordered Ouchi and two other employees to mix a new batch of fuel despite an outrageous lack of safety precautions and an abundance of dangerous shortcuts.
The three guys combined their components by hand, although they lacked any formal training in the procedure. Then they unintentionally filled the wrong tank with seven times as much uranium.
Gamma rays invaded space as Ouchi stood straight over the vessel. The evacuation of the plant and the nearby villages was still in progress as Ouchi began his extraordinary ordeal.
Hisashi Ouchi, who was kept in a separate radiation ward to keep him away from hospital-borne infections, grieved and lost his mother.
He frequently went into cardiac arrest and had to be brought back to life by his relatives. The only way out for him was to have a fatal heart collapse 83 long days later.
When Was Tokamura Nuclear Power Plant Appointed As Hisashi Ouchi?
Hisashi Ouchi, born in Japan in 1965, started his career in the nuclear energy field at a crucial juncture for his nation.
Just four years before his birth, Japan had turned to nuclear power production due to its limited natural resources and expensive reliance on imported energy. The nation’s first commercial nuclear power plant was established as a result.
What Is The Nuclear Power Plant In Tokamura?
Due to the large amount of available land, the power plant’s site in Tokaimura was excellent. It resulted in a large campus of nuclear reactors, research buildings, fuel enrichment plants, and disposal facilities.
Read More:
In the end, the fast-expanding atomic industry in the Ibaraki Prefecture northeast of Tokyo would be responsible for supporting one-third of the entire city’s population.
On March 11, 1997, a power reactor explosion devastated Tokaimura, and the locals watched in horror.
Before a government cover-up was started to disguise negligence, dozens of people were radioactively irradiated. But only two short years later, the significance of that incident would be overshadowed.
The plant transformed uranium hexafluoride into enriched uranium for use in nuclear energy. Usually, this was accomplished via a systematic, multi-step process that involved combining some components in a precise order.
To speed up the procedure, officials started testing in 1999 to determine if some of those stages could be skipped.
However, it resulted in them missing a deadline for producing fuel on September 28. So on September 30, at 10 a.m., Hisashi Ouchi, Masato Shinohara, 29, and Yutaka Yokokawa, their 54-year-old boss, tried a shortcut.
However, none of them knew what they were doing. They used their hands to pour 35 pounds of nitric acid into steel buckets instead of using mechanical pumps to combine 5.3 pounds of enriched uranium in a designated vessel. That uranium hit critical mass at 10:35 a.m.
The room exploded with a blue light, signaling the occurrence of a nuclear chain reaction and the release of fatal radiation.
How Did Hisashi Ouchi Become The Most Radioactive Man In History?
Hisashi Ouchi and his coworkers were transported to the National Institute of Radiological Sciences in Chiba as the plant was evacuated.
They were all close to the fuel. Thus they were all immediately exposed to the radiation, although to varying degrees.
Radiation exposure to more than seven sieverts is regarded as lethal. The only member of the team to survive was the supervisor, Yutaka Yokokawa, who had been exposed to three.
Hisashi Ouchi, standing directly over the steel bucket, was exposed to 17 sieverts, compared to Masato Shinohara’s 10 sieverts.
The most excellent radiation exposure ever suffered by a human was by Ouchi. He was in excruciating discomfort and was having trouble breathing.
He was already violently throwing up and unconscious when he got to the hospital. Hisashi Ouchi was covered in radiation burns, and his eyes were gushing blood.
The worst part was that he had no white blood cells and no immune system. Doctors evaluated the damage to his internal organs before putting him in a special ward to prevent infection.
He was moved to the University of Tokyo Hospital three days later, where cutting-edge stem cell treatments will be tried.
Countless skin grafts and blood transfusions were performed on Ouchi during his first week in intensive care.
Kitamura Hirai, a cell transplant expert, proposed a cutting-edge strategy that had never been used on radiation sufferers before stem cell transplants. These would quickly revive Ouchi’s capacity to produce fresh blood.
Hisashi Ouchi’s chromosomes are utterly devastated, as seen in photographs. The massive amount of radiation circulating through his blood eliminated the inserted cells.
Images of Hisashi Ouchi demonstrate that the inability of his DNA to reconstruct itself prevented the skin transplants from holding.
Hisashi Ouchi Biography:
Since the radiation disaster that occurred in 1999, Hisashi Ouchi, a lab technician at the Tokaimura nuclear power facility in Japan, has gained notoriety.
After being exposed to radiation, he was admitted to the hospital for 83 days to obtain treatment. A book titled “A Slow Death: 83 Days of Radiation Sickness” was also released about his agony from the incident.
35-year-old Hisashi Ouchi’s name is occasionally spelled “Hiroshi.” He has one brother and was born in Ibaraki. He is married, and the two of them have a little boy. He loved playing rugby when he was in school.
When the event occurred, Hisashi Ouchi was working for JCO Tokaimura Plant, where he and his coworkers produced fuel for a fast reactor.
This reactor Joyo is to blame for the tragedy. Even though his employment was quite technical, there isn’t much information in the public domain about his schooling.
Unofficial reports about him and his coworkers Masato Shinohara (39 years old) and Yutaka Yokokawa (54 years old) being “unqualified” for the job and the location where the incident occurred have been reported in local media.
Leave a Reply