JAPAN’S EMBRACE OF NUCLEAR ENERGY since World War II has been extraordinary, especially considering that the country was decimated by the world’s first and only atomic bomb attacks in 1945. By the mid-1950s, Japan had a full-fledged domestic nuclear energy program. Today, it’s the world’s third largest nuclear power and boasts the biggest nuclear station on the planet.
You would think that Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and fifty-five nuclear power stations don’t belong in the same sentence, let alone the same country. But they do. A Slow Death: 83 Days of Radiation Sickness is a cautionary tale for Japan – and for the rest of the world.
September, 1999. Two workers at the Tokaimura plant pour uranium into a much-too-small tank. Bang. The country’s first criticality accident has occurred.
Mr Ouchi, 35 years old, receives full exposure to the right side of his body, but other than a reddened hand and nausea, he appears unscathed. He is admitted to hospital, where the medical staff is eager to learn how to treat radiation exposure. Whether WWII left behind any medical lessons, the authors do not say.
Japan’s national public broadcaster, NHK-TV, dispatch a crew to follow Mr Ouchi’s case. A Slow Death: 83 Days of Radiation Poisoning, originally a TV documentary, is easily the most gruesome chronicle of radiation poisoning ever reported. It is a day-by-day, blood count-by-blood count, skin-peeling close-up.
Nothing kills like radiation. A dystopian nightmare, atomic fission does unspeakable things to the body. Beginning with our DNA, we unravel into otherworldly shreds. Unlike cancer, radiation sickness is not of the body but to the body. Resistance is futile. On Day 7 Mr Ouchi’s shattered chromosomes could no longer be identified under the microscope. White blood cells completely vanished overnight, his skin dissolved, pain was unmanageable.
Mr Ouchi is Japan’s everyman. Admired post-mortem for having “done his best,” he lies on the gurney submitting to increasingly farfetched procedures. On Day 11 he cries, “I am not a guinea pig!” His wife and son, embarrassed, return to the room next door and resume folding paper cranes. By the time of his death they will have folded 10,000.
Over 200,000 survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are still alive, their homes likely powered by nuclear generators. But while there has been a wave of stricter regulation since the accident, nuclear energy is still expected to rise to 41% of power generated in Japan by 2014.
In Canada, nuclear generators produce 15% of our electricity (as high as 50% in Ontario). We’re the world’s largest producer of uranium and we provide 85% of the world’s supply of cobalt-60, a medical isotope. There are currently twenty-nine CANDU reactors around the world. And when it comes to nuclear waste management, we just bury it under the Canadian Shield.
After Mr Ouchi’s death, an autopsy revealed that every square inch of his body was obliterated except the heart. It was, inexplicably, the only organ with red muscle cells to remain intact. The coroner asks, “How could the heart continue to maintain healthy muscle cells, when all other muscle cells had been destroyed?”
How indeed.
Leila Marshy has been published in a number of literary journals such as Descant, Grain, Fireweed, as well as anthologies including Best Canadian Stories (Oberon Press).
