For five years to 2008, the Fukushima plant was rated the most hazardous nuclear facility in Japan for worker exposure to radiation and one of the five worst nuclear plants in the world on that basis. The next rankings, compiled as a three-year average, are due this year.

Reuters uncovered these rankings, privately tracked by Fukushima’s operator Tokyo Electric Power, in a review of documents and presentations made at nuclear safety conferences over the past seven years.

In the United States — Japan’s early model in nuclear power — Fukushima’s lagging safety record would have prompted more intensive inspections by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. It would have also invited scrutiny from the U.S. Institute of Nuclear Power Operations, an independent nuclear safety organization established by the U.S. power industry after the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, experts say.

But that kind of stepped-up review never happened in Tokyo, where the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency remains an adjunct of the trade ministry charged with promoting nuclear power.

As Japan debates its future energy policy after the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl, a Reuters review of the long-troubled record at Fukushima shows how hard it has been to keep the country’s oldest reactors running in the best of times. It also shows how Japan’s nuclear establishment sold nuclear power to the public as a relatively cheap energy source in part by putting cost-containment ahead of radiation safety over the past several decades.

“After the Fukushima accident, we need to reconsider the cost of nuclear power,” Tatsujiro Suzuki, vice chairman of Japan’s Atomic Energy Commission, told Reuters. “It’s not enough to meet safety standards. The industry needs to search for the best performance.”

In an illustration of the scale of the safety problems at Fukushima, Tokyo Electric had set a 10-year goal that insiders considered ambitious in 2007. The plan was to reduce radiation exposure for workers at Fukushima to bring the facility from near rock-bottom in the industry’s global safety rankings to somewhere below-average by 2017, documents show.

“Severer management than before will be required,” Tokyo Electric safety researcher Yasunori Kokubun and four other colleagues said in an English-language 2004 report. That report examined why Japan lagged other countries such as France and the United States in limiting radiation exposure for workers during plant maintenance.

The report came from an earlier period of corporate soul searching by Tokyo Electric, a politically powerful regional monopoly in Japan that ran the Fukushima power station and remains in charge of the clean-up work at the crippled plant expected to take a decade or more.

In 2002, the chairman and president of the utility were forced to step down after regulators concluded the company had routinely filed false reports during safety inspections and hid evidence of trouble at its reactors, including Fukushima. All 17 of Tokyo Electric’s reactors were ordered shut down. The last of those did not restart until 2005.

COST-SAVING CULTURE

As part of a bid to win back public trust, the utility promised to repair a “safety culture” it said had failed in the scandal. Teams of newly empowered radiation safety managers were created and began to audit the company’s nuclear operations, including Fukushima. They also reported back findings to other nuclear plant operators and regulators. None of the utility’s safety managers who gave those archived presentations responded to requests for comment for this report.

One problem, according to one of those early assessments, was that Tokyo Electric’s managers on the ground tended to put cost savings ahead of a commitment to keep driving worker radiation doses “as low as reasonably achievable,” the international standard for safety.

Take maintenance, for instance. Japanese plants are required to shut down every 13 months for almost four months at a time — twice as long as the U.S. average. Tepco was slow to invest in the more expensive radiation safety precautions needed during maintenance, thus lowering the cost of operating Fukushima before the accident.

But that focus on costs also kept Tepco from developing a more active commitment to worker safety that could have helped it navigate the March disaster, officials now say.

After the earthquake, contract workers at Fukushima were sent in without radiation meters or basic gear such as rubber boots. Screening for radiation from dust and vapor inhaled by workers was delayed for weeks until experts said the testing was almost meaningless. At least 39 workers were exposed to more than 100 millisieverts of radiation, five times the maximum allowed in a normal year.

Fukushima Daiichi, built in a poor region on Japan’s Pacific Coast to supply power to Tokyo, was pushed into crisis by the massive March 11 earthquake and the tsunami that hit less than an hour later. The backup power systems meant to keep its radioactive fuel cool were disabled, leading to meltdowns, explosions and radiation spewing into the environment, forcing the evacuation of more than 80,000 residents.

Goshi Hosono, the government minister appointed to coordinate Japan’s response to the Fukushima crisis, said he was not aware of the details of Fukushima’s radiation safety record before March 11 and declined to comment on that basis.

But he said the utility had failed to protect workers in the chaos that followed the accident, prompting a reprimand from government officials and a decision by regulators to take charge of radiation health monitoring at the plant.

“In normal times, radiation monitoring would be left to the plant operator, but these are not normal times,” Hosono told Reuters.

HIGHER RADIATION IN OLD PLANTS

In a June report to the International Atomic Energy Agency, Japanese officials said basic design failures, a fatal underestimation of tsunami risk and a chaotic decision-making process had contributed to the disaster. But they also said Tokyo Electric’s “safety culture” had failed it again.

Outside experts agreed. “The main root causes of this man-made disaster can be found in (Tokyo Electric’s) ineffective — exemplary poor — safety practices and track record,” said Najim Meshkati, an engineering professor at the University of Southern California and former U.S. government science advisor.

In response to questions about the radiation safety record at Fukushima, Tokyo Electric said that radiation exposure for each individual worker at the plant had been kept below the regulatory standard. The overall radiation level remained relatively high because the plant’s six reactors were all between 30 and 40 years old at the time of the accident, the utility said.

“Because it was an older plant it required longer maintenance periods and more intensive repair work,” Tokyo Electric spokeswoman Ryoko Sakai said. “For that reason, the overall radiation exposure was higher than our other plants.”

The General Electric-derived design of the reactors at Fukushima posed a particular safety challenge during routine shutdowns because radioactive steam is allowed to circulate through the power-generating turbine. That means that large parts of the power plant pose a radiation risk during repairs, experts say.

But even compared to other boiling water reactors, Fukushima stood out for its risks. At the start of the decade, each of its reactors had exposed workers to 2.5 times the amount of radiation they would have faced in an average U.S. reactor of the same design. By 2009, that gap had narrowed, but exposure at Fukushima was still 1.7 times the U.S. average and equivalent to subjecting workers on the site to a collective 1,500 full-body CT scans each year.

Because of Fukushima’s high radiation, Tokyo Electric brought in thousands of workers each year, often to work just a few days on the most hazardous jobs. The utility employed almost 9,000 contract workers annually on average at the plant over the past decade, according to records kept by Japan’s trade ministry.

Those workers were needed in part to allow Tokyo Electric to meet the international safety standard Japan had committed to in 2001. Under that standard, workers were limited to 20 millisieverts of radiation exposure in an average year, equivalent to getting two CT scans at work.

But even with its extraordinary work force, the average contract worker at Fukushima was exposed to 73 percent more radiation than the average nuclear worker at other plants in Japan over the past decade, according to a Reuters review of data from Japan’s trade and industry ministry. The same worker was also exposed to almost three times the amount of radiation that Tokyo Electric’s own staff faced. The average radiation dose ran almost a third higher than for U.S. workers at similar plants.

The number of Fukushima workers near the annual limit for radiation also remained troublingly high. Over the past five years, each Fukushima reactor exposed almost 300 workers to between 10 and 20 millisieverts of radiation, the Reuters review of the data showed. The comparable figure for U.S. reactors of similar design was just 22 workers per reactor with those kinds of exposure levels.

‘THIS SITUATION IS THE WORST’

Part of the reason was that Fukushima maintenance work took almost three times longer than comparable jobs at U.S. plants — more than four months on average. But American utilities have also spent heavily as a group on steps to reduce worker exposure, including building mock-up reactors so workers could rehearse dangerous jobs almost as commandos would.

“We are ready and willing to spend money to reduce worker doses,” said John Bickel, a nuclear safety expert who has consulted for the NRC and the IAEA. “I would characterize that there is an intense competition in the U.S. to be the lowest.”

By contrast, critics of the Japanese nuclear industry cite records showing how Tokyo Electric and other utilities shifted the health risks of operating nuclear plants to a group of relatively poor and sometimes homeless day laborers desperate for a quick payday.

“Nuclear power is based on discrimination, a system in which the people who are working to protect nuclear safety end up on the streets and are given the cold shoulder by society. All of us who use electricity are responsible for this system,” said Yuko Fujita, a former physics professor at Keio University who has campaigned for nuclear worker safety in Japan for over 20 years.

To be sure, Tokyo Electric had taken steps to reduce the amount of radiation workers faced. It changed the chemistry of water piped through the reactors to reduce corrosion in pipes. It developed robots and remote-controlled probes to inspect hazards rather than sending in workers. And it used radiation shields such as lead “blankets” wrapped around pipes during maintenance to limit radiation in places workers had to be.

Those measures had reduced the overall radiation exposure for workers at Fukushima to a third of the 1978 peak by the start of the past decade, the records show.

But by 2006, Tokyo Electric safety managers had decided that they had to take on a tougher problem to make any more progress. They needed to reform the basic organization of the utility, where maintenance managers faced no pressure to meet targets for reducing radiation exposure for the thousands of contractors and day laborers, two reports show.

The only more dangerous plants from 2003 to 2005 on that basis had been the Tarapur nuclear plant in India, where two reactors shared the basic Fukushima design, and the Perry nuclear plant on Lake Erie outside Cleveland, Ohio.

Perry, which is operated by FirstEnergy Corp, was cited by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a series of safety mistakes during a maintenance period in April. In that incident, regulators said four workers were exposed to high levels of radiation after being sent to retrieve a radiation monitor near the reactor’s core. The plant has been the target of NRC safety inspections for more than three years because of what U.S. regulators call “human performance” issues in safety management.

COMPLACENCY SETS IN

Tokyo Electric did not come to terms with its own management and organizational problems related to safety until recent years, the record shows.

Shiro Takahira, a Tokyo Electric manager in charge of radiation safety, showed a conference in October 2006 a chart depicting Fukushima Daiichi as the third-worst nuclear plant in the world in terms of worker exposure to radiation.

“This graph could be a good driving force to improve our process,” Takahira told the radiation safety conference in Niigata, Japan, according to remarks posted by the organizer. Takahira said Tokyo Electric had traditionally “put more weight on cost effectiveness” than the need to keep driving radiation exposure down. “There has been no standard mechanism to promote (the standard of ‘as low as reasonably achievable’) systematically and continuously,” he said.

By late 2006, radiation safety managers such as Takahira had won a seat at the table in planning repair jobs at nuclear plants including Fukushima. By 2007, the company set a goal of getting the annual radiation at each Fukushima reactor to about 2.5 sieverts, a more manageable dose equivalent to about 250 CT scans for workers. That would mean Fukushima was still lagging the industry but by a narrower margin.

The full-year radiation for 2008 and 2009 came in just below 2.5 sieverts of exposure per reactor, just under the goal managers had set in 2007. On a three-year rolling basis, the exposure was 2.53 sieverts per reactor between 2007 to 2009.

“We had largely reached our target by 2009,” said Tokyo Electric’s Sakai.

At that point, some of the urgency behind the safety campaign appeared to drain. “We’ll continue to try to reduce occupational exposures by every possible measure after cost performance evaluations,” Shunsuke Hori, a Tokyo Electric safety manager, said at a September 2009 conference in Aomori, Japan.

Hori was one of two Tokyo Electric safety managers who published what amounted to a declaration of victory after the nascent effort to improve radiation safety.

“The reliability of Japanese nuclear plants is now quite high,” Hori and another Tokyo Electric manager, Akira Suzuki, wrote in a radiation health journal. “The Japanese nuclear industry has over 40 years of radiation protection experience, and it is believed that more radiation control will be possible in the future using this experience.”

The upbeat assessment was published in a little-read scientific journal, Radiation Protection Dosimetry, on April 26, 2011, the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster.

On the ground in Fukushima that day, white smoke was still steaming off three of the reactors, and residents to the northwest had started a wider round of evacuations.

(Additional reporting by Scott DiSavino in New York and Eileen O’Grady in Houston) (Editing by Bill Tarrant)

Then, as now, a small army of transient workers was put to
work to try to stem the damage at the oldest nuclear reactor run
by Japan’s largest utility.

At the time, workers were racing to finish an unprecedented
repair to address a dangerous defect: cracks in the drum-like
steel assembly known as the “shroud” surrounding the radioactive
core of the reactor.

But in 1997, the effort to save the 21-year-old reactor from
being scrapped at a large loss to its operator, Tokyo Electric,
also included a quiet effort to skirt Japan’s safety rules:
foreign workers were brought in for the most dangerous jobs, a
manager of the project said.

“It’s not well known, but I know what happened,” Kazunori
Fujii, who managed part of the shroud replacement in 1997, told
Reuters. “What we did would not have been allowed under Japanese
safety standards.”

The previously undisclosed hiring of welders from the United
States and Southeast Asia underscores the way Tokyo Electric, a
powerful monopoly with deep political connections in Japan,
outsourced its riskiest work and developed a lax safety culture
in the years leading to the Fukushima disaster, experts say.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Special Reports on disaster: r.reuters.com/tec78r

Fukushima timeline graphic: link.reuters.com/myb98r

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

A 9.0 earthquake on March 11 triggered a 15-metre tsunami
that smashed into the seaside Fukushima Daiichi plant and set
off a series of events that caused its reactors to start melting
down.

Hydrogen explosions scattered debris across the complex and
sent up a plume of radioactive steam that forced the evacuation
of more than 80,000 residents near the plant, about 240 km (150
miles) northeast of Tokyo. Enough radioactive water to fill 40
Olympic swimming pools has also been collected at the plant and
threatens to leak into the groundwater.

The repeated failures that have dogged Tokyo Electric in the
three months the Fukushima plant has been in crisis have
undercut confidence in the response to the disaster and dismayed
outside experts, given corporate Japan’s reputation for
relentless organization.

Hastily hired workers were sent into the plant without
radiation meters. Two splashed into radioactive water wearing
street shoes because rubber boots were not available. Even now,
few have been given training on radiation risks that meets
international standards, according to their accounts and the
evaluation of experts.

The workers who stayed on to try to stabilize the plant in
the darkest hours after March 11 were lauded as the “Fukushima
50″ for their selflessness. But behind the heroism is a legacy
of Japanese nuclear workers facing hazards with little
oversight, according to interviews with more than two dozen
current and former nuclear workers, doctors and others.

Since the start of the nuclear boom in the 1970s, Japan’s
utilities have relied on temporary workers for maintenance and
plant repair jobs, the experts said. They were often paid in
cash with little training and no follow-up health screening.

This practice has eroded the ability of nuclear plant
operators to manage the massive risks workers now face and
prompted calls for the Japanese government to take over the
Fukushima clean-up effort.

Although almost 9,000 workers have been involved in work
around the mangled reactors, Tokyo Electric did not have a
Japan-made robot capable of monitoring radiation inside the
reactors until this week. That job was left to workers,
reflecting the industry’s reliance on cheap labor, critics say.

“I can only think that to the power companies, contract
workers are just disposable pieces of equipment,” said Kunio
Horie, who worked at nuclear plants, including Fukushima
Daiichi, in the late 1970s and wrote about his experience in a
book “Nuclear Gypsy”.

Tokyo Electric said this week it cannot find 69 of the more
than 3,600 workers who were brought in to Fukushima just after
the disaster because their names were never recorded. Others
were identified by Tepco in accident reports only by initials:
“A-san” or “B-san.”

Makoto Akashi, executive director at the National Institute
of Radiological Sciences near Tokyo, said he was shocked to
learn Tokyo Electric had not screened some of the earliest
workers for radiation inside their bodies until June while
others had to share monitors to measure external radiation.

That means health risks for workers – and future costs -
will be difficult to estimate.

“We have to admit that we didn’t have an adequate system for
checking radiation exposure,” said Goshi Hosono, an official
appointed by Prime Minister Naoto Kan to coordinate the response
to the crisis.

‘BROAD IS THE ROAD THAT LEADS TO DESTRUCTION’

Fujii, who devoted his career to building Japanese nuclear
power plants as a manager with IHI Corporation, was troubled by
what he saw at Fukushima in 1997.

Now 72, he remembers falling for “the romance of nuclear
power” as a student at Tokyo’s Rikkyo University in the 1960s.
“The idea that you could take a substance small enough to fit
into a tea cup and produce almost infinite power seemed almost
like a dream” he said.

He had asked to oversee part of the job at Fukushima as the
last big assignment of his career. He threw himself into the
work, heading into the reactor for inspections. “I had a sense
of mission,” he said.

As he watched a group of Americans at work in the reactor
one day, Fujii jotted down a Bible verse in his diary that
captured his angst: “Wide is the gate and broad is the road that
leads to destruction and many enter through it.”

The basis for nuclear safety regulation is the assumption
that cancers, including leukemia, can be caused years later by
exposure to relatively small amounts of radiation, far below the
level that would cause immediate sickness. In normal operations,
international nuclear workers are limited to an average exposure
of 20 millisieverts per year, about 10 times natural background
radiation levels.

At Fukushima in 1997, Japanese safety rules were applied in
a way that set very low radiation exposure limits on a daily
basis, Fujii said. That was a prudent step, safety experts say,
but it severely limited what Japanese workers could do on a
single shift and increased costs.

The workaround was to bring in foreign workers who would
absorb a full-year’s allowable dose of radiation of between 20
millisieverts and 25 millisieverts in just a few days.

“We brought in workers from Southeast Asia and Saudi Arabia
who had experience building oil tankers. They took a heavier
dose of radiation than Japanese workers could have,” said Fujii,
adding that American workers were also hired.

Tokyo Electric would admit five years later it had hid
evidence of the extent of the defect in the shroud from
regulators. That may have added to the pressure to finish the
job quickly. When new cracks were found, they were fixed without
a report to regulators, according to disclosures made in 2002

It is not clear if the radiation doses for the foreign
workers were recorded on an individual basis or if they have
faced any heath problems. Tepco said it had no access to the
worker records kept by its subcontractors. IHI said it had no
record of the hiring of the foreign workers. Toshiba, another
major contractor, also said it could not confirm that foreign
workers were hired.

Hosono, the government official overseeing the response to
the disaster, said he was not aware of foreign

Then, as now, a small army of transient workers was put to work to try to stem the damage at the oldest nuclear reactor run by Japan’s largest utility.

At the time, workers were racing to finish an unprecedented repair to address a dangerous defect: cracks in the drum-like steel assembly known as the “shroud” surrounding the radioactive core of the reactor.

But in 1997, the effort to save the 21-year-old reactor from being scrapped at a large loss to its operator, Tokyo Electric, also included a quiet effort to skirt Japan’s safety rules: foreign workers were brought in for the most dangerous jobs, a manager of the project said.

“It’s not well known, but I know what happened,” Kazunori Fujii, who managed part of the shroud replacement in 1997, told Reuters. “What we did would not have been allowed under Japanese safety standards.”

The previously undisclosed hiring of welders from the United States and Southeast Asia underscores the way Tokyo Electric, a powerful monopoly with deep political connections in Japan, outsourced its riskiest work and developed a lax safety culture in the years leading to the Fukushima disaster, experts say.

A 9.0 earthquake on March 11 triggered a 15-meter tsunami that smashed into the seaside Fukushima Daiichi plant and set off a series of events that caused its reactors to start melting down.

Hydrogen explosions scattered debris across the complex and sent up a plume of radioactive steam that forced the evacuation of more than 80,000 residents near the plant, about 240 km (150 miles) northeast of Tokyo. Enough radioactive water to fill 40 Olympic swimming pools has also been collected at the plant and threatens to leak into the groundwater.

The repeated failures that have dogged Tokyo Electric in the three months the Fukushima plant has been in crisis have undercut confidence in the response to the disaster and dismayed outside experts, given corporate Japan’s reputation for relentless organization.

Hastily hired workers were sent into the plant without radiation meters. Two splashed into radioactive water wearing street shoes because rubber boots were not available. Even now, few have been given training on radiation risks that meets international standards, according to their accounts and the evaluation of experts.

The workers who stayed on to try to stabilize the plant in the darkest hours after March 11 were lauded as the “Fukushima 50″ for their selflessness. But behind the heroism is a legacy of Japanese nuclear workers facing hazards with little oversight, according to interviews with more than two dozen current and former nuclear workers, doctors and others.

Since the start of the nuclear boom in the 1970s, Japan’s utilities have relied on temporary workers for maintenance and plant repair jobs, the experts said. They were often paid in cash with little training and no follow-up health screening.

This practice has eroded the ability of nuclear plant operators to manage the massive risks workers now face and prompted calls for the Japanese government to take over the Fukushima clean-up effort.

Although almost 9,000 workers have been involved in work around the mangled reactors, Tokyo Electric did not have a Japan-made robot capable of monitoring radiation inside the reactors until this week. That job was left to workers, reflecting the industry’s reliance on cheap labor, critics say.

“I can only think that to the power companies, contract workers are just disposable pieces of equipment,” said Kunio Horie, who worked at nuclear plants, including Fukushima Daiichi, in the late 1970s and wrote about his experience in a book “Nuclear Gypsey.”

Tokyo Electric said this week it cannot find 69 of the more than 3,600 workers who were brought in to Fukushima just after the disaster because their names were never recorded. Others were identified by Tepco in accident reports only by initials: “A-san” or “B-san.”

Makoto Akashi, executive director at the National Institute of Radiological Sciences near Tokyo, said he was shocked to learn Tokyo Electric had not screened some of the earliest workers for radiation inside their bodies until June while others had to share monitors to measure external radiation.

That means health risks for workers – and future costs – will be difficult to estimate.

“We have to admit that we didn’t have an adequate system for checking radiation exposure,” said Goshi Hosono, an official appointed by Prime Minister Naoto Kan to coordinate the response to the crisis.

‘BROAD IS THE ROAD THAT LEADS TO DESTRUCTION’

Fujii, who devoted his career to building Japanese nuclear power plants as a manager with IHI Corporation, was troubled by what he saw at Fukushima in 1997.

Now 72, he remembers falling for “the romance of nuclear power” as a student at Tokyo’s Rikkyo University in the 1960s. “The idea that you could take a substance small enough to fit into a tea cup and produce almost infinite power seemed almost like a dream” he said.

He had asked to oversee part of the job at Fukushima as the last big assignment of his career. He threw himself into the work, heading into the reactor for inspections. “I had a sense of mission,” he said.

As he watched a group of Americans at work in the reactor one day, Fujii jotted down a Bible verse in his diary that captured his angst: “Wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction and many enter through it.”

The basis for nuclear safety regulation is the assumption that cancers, including leukemia, can be caused years later by exposure to relatively small amounts of radiation, far below the level that would cause immediate sickness. In normal operations, international nuclear workers are limited to an average exposure of 20 millisieverts per year, about 10 times natural background radiation levels.

At Fukushima in 1997, Japanese safety rules were applied in a way that set very low radiation exposure limits on a daily basis, Fujii said. That was a prudent step, safety experts say, but it severely limited what Japanese workers could do on a single shift and increased costs.

The workaround was to bring in foreign workers who would absorb a full-year’s allowable dose of radiation of between 20 millisieverts and 25 millisieverts in just a few days.

“We brought in workers from Southeast Asia and Saudi Arabia who had experience building oil tankers. They took a heavier dose of radiation than Japanese workers could have,” said Fujii, adding that American workers were also hired.

Tokyo Electric would admit five years later it had hid evidence of the extent of the defect in the shroud from regulators. That may have added to the pressure to finish the job quickly. When new cracks were found, they were fixed without a report to regulators, according to disclosures made in 2002

It is not clear if the radiation doses for the foreign workers were recorded on an individual basis or if they have faced any heath problems. Tepco said it had no access to the worker records kept by its subcontractors. IHI said it had no record of the hiring of the foreign workers. Toshiba, another major contractor, also said it could not confirm that foreign workers were hired.

Hosono, the government official overseeing the response to the disaster, said he was not aware of foreign workers being brought in to do repair work in the past and they would not be sent in now.

Now retired outside Tokyo, Fujii said he has come to see nuclear power as an “imperfect technology.”

“This is an unfortunate thing to say, but the nuclear industry has long relied on people at the lowest level of Japanese society,” he said.

PAY-BY-THE-DAY

Since the late 1960s, the Kamagasaki neighborhood of Osaka has been a dumping ground for men battling drug and alcohol addiction, ex-convicts, and men looking for a construction job with few questions. It has also been a hiring spot for Japan’s nuclear industry for decades.

“Kamagasaki is a place that companies have always come for workers that they can use and then throw away,” said Hiroshi Inagaki, a labor activist.

The nearby Lawson’s store has a sign on its bathroom door warning that anyone trying to flush a used syringe down the toilet will be prosecuted. Peddlers sell scavenged trash, including used shoes and rice cookers. A pair of yakuza enforcers in black shirts and jeans walks the street to collect loans.

The center of Kamagasaki is an office that connects day laborers with the small construction firms that roll up before dawn in vans and minibuses.

Within a week after the Fukushima disaster, Tepco had engaged Japan’s biggest construction and engineering companies to run the job of trying to bring the plant under control. They in turned hired smaller firms, over 600 of them. That cascade brought the first job offers to Kamagasaki by mid-March.

One hiring notice sought a truck driver for Miyagi, one of the prefectures hit hard by the tsunami. But when an Osaka day laborer in his 60s accepted the job, he was sent instead to Fukushima where he was put to work handling water to cool the No. 5 reactor.

The man, who did not want to be identified, was paid the equivalent of about $300 a day, twice what he was first promised. But he was only issued a radiation meter on his fourth day. Inagaki said the man was seeking a financial settlement from Tokyo Electric. “We think what happened here is illegal,” he said.

Nearby, several men waiting to be hired in Kamagasaki said they had experience working at nuclear plants.

A 58-year-old former member of Japan’s Self Defense Forces from southern Japan who asked to be identified only by his nickname, Jumbo, said he had worked at Tokyo Electric’s Kashiwazaki-Kariwa power plant for a two-month job. He knows others who have gone to Fukushima from the hiring line at Kamagasaki, he said.

“We’ve always had nuclear work here, and I would go again,” he said.

THE ABANDONED SPA

In Iwaki, a town south of the Fukushima plant once known for a splashy Hawaiian-themed resort, the souvenir stands and coffee shops are closed or losing money. The drinking spots known as “snacks” are starting to come back as workers far from home seek the company of bar girls.

“It’s becoming like an army base,” said Shukuko Kuzumi, 63, who runs a cake shop across from the main rail station. “There are workers who come here knowing what the work is like, but I think there are many who don’t.”

Each morning, hired workers pile into buses and beat-up vans and set out from the nearly abandoned resort. More men in the standard-issue white work pajamas pour out of the shipping containers turned into temporary housing at the Hirono highway exit where residents have fled and weeds have overgrown the sidewalks.

They gather at a now abandoned soccer complex where Argentina’s soccer team trained during the 2002 World Cup to get

briefed on the tasks for the shifts ahead. They then change into the gear many have come to dread: two or three pairs of gloves, full face masks, goggles and white protective suits. More than a dozen Fukushima workers have collapsed of heat stroke, and the rising heat weighs more heavily on the minds of workers than threat of radiation.

“I don’t know how I’m going to make it if it gets much hotter than this,” a heavyset, 36-year-old Tokyo man said as he stretched out at Hirono after a day of spraying a green resin around the plant to keep radioactive dust from spreading.

The risks from the radiation hotspots at Fukushima remain considerable. A vent of steam in the No. 1 reactor was found earlier this month to be radioactive enough to kill anyone standing near it for more than an hour.

Tokyo Electric has been given a sanction-free reprimand for its handling of radiation exposure at Fukushima. Nine workers have exceeded the emergency exposure limit of 250 millisieverts. Another 115 have exceeded 100 millisieverts of exposure. The two workers with the highest radiation readings topped 600 millisieverts of exposure.

For context, the largest study of nuclear workers to date by the International Agency for Research on Cancer found a risk of roughly two additional fatal cancers for every 100 people exposed to 100 millisieverts of radiation.

But several Fukushima workers say they have been told not to worry about health risks unless they top 100 or near 200 millisieverts of exposure in training by contractors.

Experts say that runs counter to international standards. The International Atomic Energy Agency requires workers in a nuclear emergency to give “informed consent” to the risks they face and that they understand danger exists at even low doses.

Tokyo Electric spokesman Junichi Matsumoto said the utility could not confirm what kind of training smaller firms were providing. “The subcontractors have a responsibility as well,” he said. “I don’t know what kind of briefing they are getting.”

Kim Kearfott, a nuclear engineer and radiation health expert from the University of Michigan who toured Japan in May, said authorities needed to ensure that safety training was handled independently by outside experts.

“The potential for coercion and undue influence over a day laborer audience is high, especially when the training and consent are administered by those who control hiring and firing of workers,” she said.

Tokyo Electric has been challenged before on its training. Mitsuaki Nagao, a plumber who had worked at three plants including Fukushima, said he was never briefed on radiation dangers, and would routinely use another worker’s dosimeter to finish jobs. Some doctors worry that the same under-reporting of radiation could happen at Fukushima as well.

Nagao sued Tokyo Electric when he was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a type of bone marrow cancer, in 2004. His lawsuit, one of two known worker cases against a Japanese utility, was rejected by a Tokyo court, which ruled no links had been proven between his radiation and his illness. He died in 2007.

Some doctors are urging Japan’s government to set up a system of health monitoring for the thousands of workers streaming through Fukushima. Some also want to see a standard of care guaranteed.

“This is also a problem of economics,” said Kristin Schrader-Frechette, a Notre Dame University professor and nuclear safety expert. “If Japan wants to know the true costs of nuclear power versus the alternatives, it needs to know what these health care costs are.”

(Editing by Bill Tarrant)

Large and growing pools of radioactive water were in danger of spilling into the sea within a week unless the plan got under way, officials had said earlier this week.

Tokyo Electric Power Co, known as Tepco, has pumped massive amounts of water to cool three reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant that went into meltdown after a March 11 earthquake and tsunami disabled cooling systems.

But managing the radioactive water has become a major headache as the plant runs out of places to keep it. Around 110,000 tonnes of highly radioactive water — enough to fill 40 Olympic-size swimming pools — is stored at the plant.

Tepco, with help from French nuclear group Areva, U.S. firm Kurion and other companies, has been test-running a system in which radioactive water is decontaminated and re-used to cool the reactors.

But in a setback that delayed the plan by about a week it said water had leaked from a facility used to absorb caesium on Thursday.

Tepco official Junichi Matsumoto told reporters that the operator was aiming to use some of the cleaned water to cool the reactors within the next few days, which would not require the pumping in of fresh water.

DUMPED IN OCEAN

In early April, the utility dumped about 10,000 tonnes of water with low-level radioactivity into the ocean, prompting criticism from neighbours China and South Korea.

Even if the water treatment is successful, Tepco would next face the problem of dealing with highly radioactive sludge that will be left over from the decontamination process. It is unclear where the sludge will be stored in the long-term.

Despite the mounting challenges, Tepco aims to complete initial steps to limit the release of further radiation from the plant 240 km (150 miles) northeast of Tokyo and to shut down its three unstable reactors by January 2012.

Tepco announced on Friday, as expected, that it had not made significant changes to its timeline.

The operator said that storing high radiation sludge likely to result from the treatment of contaminated water and improving the conditions for their workers during the approaching summer were extra areas it was looking into.

Measures for the workers include access to more doctors and body counters that measure exposure to radiation and new resting areas away from the summer heat, Tepco said.

The ultimate goal is to bring the reactors to a state of “cold shutdown,” where the uranium at the core is no longer capable of boiling off the water used as a coolant.

That would allow officials to move on to cleaning up the site and eventually removing the fuel, a process that could take more than a decade.

(Additional reporting by Shinichi Saoshiro; Editing by Alex Richardson)

Tokyo Electric Power Co, known as Tepco, has pumped massive amounts of water to cool three reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant that went into meltdown after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami disabled cooling systems.

But managing the radioactive water has become a major headache as the plant runs out of places to keep it. Around 110,000 metric tones of highly radioactive water — enough to fill 40 Olympic-size swimming pools — is stored at the plant.

Tepco, with help from French nuclear group Areva, U.S. firm Kurion and other companies, has been test-running a system in which radioactive water is decontaminated and re-used to cool the reactors.

In a setback, however, it said water had leaked from a facility used to absorb cesium on Thursday, although it hoped to replace equipment and start the decontamination process by the end of Friday as planned.

“We think we can start the system by tonight,” Tepco official Junichi Matsumoto told reporters.

If the treatment system does not work, the complex could run out of space to store contaminated water as early as June 20, and it could then spill into the sea, Tepco has said.

The start of Japan’s month-long rainy season has also added to the risk of water buildup.

In early April, the utility dumped about 10,000 metric tones of water with low-level radioactivity into the ocean, prompting criticism from neighbors China and South Korea.

Even if the water treatment is successful, Tepco would next face the problem of dealing with highly radioactive sludge that will be left over from the decontamination process. It is unclear where the sludge will be stored in the long-term.

Despite the mounting challenges, Tepco aims to complete initial steps to limit the release of further radiation from the plant 240 km (150 miles) northeast of Tokyo and to shut down its three unstable reactors by January 2012.

It will present an update to those plans on Friday with no significant changes expected in the timeline.

The ultimate goal is to bring the reactors to a state of “cold shutdown,” where the uranium at the core is no longer capable of boiling off the water used as a coolant.

That would allow officials to move on to cleaning up the site and eventually removing the fuel from the site, a process that could take more than a decade.

(Reporting by Chisa Fujioka; Editing by Chris Gallagher)

The ruling Democratic Party (DPJ) is considering raising
both taxes by around 10 percent, generating 1-2 trillion yen
($12-24 billion) in annual revenue to pay back borrowing for
reconstruction over a decade, the Mainichi newspaper reported
without citing a source.

The party will not use revenue from the sales tax to cover
the reconstruction bonds, the paper said, as it wants to use
that tax for growing social security costs and is already
considering doubling it to 10 percent.

The government is trying to set the direction for Japan’s
biggest rebuilding effort since the post World War Two period,
estimated to cost over $300 billion, after the March disaster
devastated the nation’s northeast coast.

Many lawmakers are wary of tax hikes, however, worrying they
could alienate voters. Mounting calls for unpopular Prime
Minister Naoto Kan to step down also make it unclear if the
DPJ-led government could push tax hikes through parliament.

A nonpartisan group of 211 lawmakers said on Thursday they
oppose tax hikes for reconstruction. Instead they urged the Bank
of Japan to buy “reconstruction bonds” by boosting outright
purchases of long-term government bonds from the market beyond
the current 21.6 trillion yen ($267 billion).

“In principle we are against all kinds of tax hikes in the
name of reconstruction. We can carry out reconstruction without
resorting to a tax hike,” DPJ lawmaker Takeshi Miyazaki told
reporters.

The BOJ has been resisting calls for it to boost purchases
of government bonds out of concerns that such a move, if
perceived by financial markets as monetising debt, could cause a
spike in bond yields.

Some ruling party lawmakers had earlier this year sought to
have BOJ directly underwrite government debt by buying
reconstruction bonds, but the idea was quickly dismissed by
cabinet ministers.

Kan ordered cabinet ministers this week to compile an
additional budget to help pay for reconstruction, to be
submitted to parliament next month. The legislature approved a
first emergency budget in May involving 4 trillion yen in
spending.

Finance Minister Yoshihiko Noda has said the government will
avoid issuing extra bonds to finance a second extra budget.

But further spending will likely require bond issuance at a
time when investors are nervous about Japan’s huge debt, already
twice the size of the $5 trillion economy, the worst among
industrial countries.

The ruling party is looking for spending of around 2
trillion yen in the second extra budget for rebuilding, media
said on Wednesday.
($1 = 81.035 Japanese Yen)

(Editing by Michael Watson)

The ruling Democratic Party (DPJ) is struggling to pass
legislation in the parliament, where the opposition controls the
upper house and has been blocking bills to try to force
unpopular Prime Minister Naoto Kan to resign.

The party’s No. 2, Katsuya Okada, said it planned to submit
a “compact” extra budget in mid-July, followed by a bigger extra
budget later on, also for reconstruction. The party is looking
at spending of around 2 trillion yen ($24.9 billion)in the next
extra budget after a first budget double that size was approved
in May, Jiji news agency quoted Okada as saying.

Kan ordered his cabinet ministers on Monday to
compile an additional budget for submission next month.

“It would be unthinkable to close parliament and
take a summer break while we are dealing with the disaster,”
Okada, the DPJ secretary-general, said in a speech to a union
group.

“We need a big extension of the parliament session to debate
and pass necessary bills.”

Kan, in office for one year as Japan’s fifth prime minister
in as many years, survived a no confidence vote early this month
by promising to step down, though he did not say when. The
pledge, however, failed to break a policy deadlock with the
opposition, which refuses to cooperate with the Democrats as
long as Kan stays on.

Besides the extra budget, lawmakers have yet to approve a
bill needed to fund more than 40 percent of this fiscal year’s
budget and a draft law on compensation to victims of radiation
leaks at Tokyo Electric’s (Tepco) Fukushima nuclear
plant.

However, it may take more than Kan’s departure to reach an
agreement.

The opposition is pressing the ruling party to drop some of
its other spending plans and politicians are at odds over the
compensation bill to help Tepco pay billions of dollars in
compensation to businesses and individuals from around the
Fukushima plant.

Kan, struggling with dismal popularity ratings before the
March 11 disaster, drew fire for slow and indecisive response to
what he himself described as Japan’s worst crisis since the
World War Two.

The opposition and critics within his own party want Kan to
leave this month, which could possibly clear the way for a
coalition with the main opposition Liberal Democratic Party.

The current session of parliament was due to end on June 22.

Finance Minister Yoshihiko Noda said on Tuesday the
government would avoid issuing extra bonds to finance the second
extra budget, which aims to cover areas including those related
to the nuclear crisis triggered by the disaster.

Okada agreed with the party’s parliamentary affairs chief
that the session should be extended for three months, Jiji news
agency reported.

($1 = 80.440 Japanese Yen)

(Additional reporting by Tetsushi Kajimoto; Editing by Tomasz
Janowski and Daniel Magnowski)

TOKYO (Reuters Life!) – In Japan, where nature is believed to cleanse spirits, how do people cope when treasured mountains and oceans are tainted by leaks of radiation from a nuclear power plant?

Sokyu Genyu, a Buddhist priest from a temple just 45 km (28 miles) west of the damaged Fukushima Daiichi plant in northeast Japan, is drawing attention to the less visible scars from the world’s worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl in 1986.

As a member of a government panel to come up with a blueprint for rebuilding after the deadly earthquake and tsunami on March 11, Genyu is adding the people’s voice — and a different view — to debate on dealing with the loss of homes, jobs and communities.

“We need to treat the situation in areas affected by radiation separately,” said Genyu, head priest of the Fukujuji Temple and also an award-winning author, told Reuters.

“It’s not just about getting compensation.”

His small town of Miharu has welcomed thousands of residents who have evacuated from around the nuclear plant, still leaking radiation after being struck by the tsunami.

Damage to the environment has been especially hard on local communities, where farmers and fishermen have traditionally associated nature with god, building shrines to pray for rich harvests and to ward off accidents at sea, Genyu said.

“God is the symbol of nature, what people worship as a natural force that can be violent and is uncontrollable,” he said.

CLEANSING SOULS

In turn, people have believed in nature cleansing their souls. For example, some Japanese go for a swim in the sea on New Year’s Day as a purification ritual.

“Mountains and oceans have purified us but now those mountains and oceans are contaminated,” he said.

“We could see the very foundation for our religious beliefs break down, because it is no longer able to purify us.”

The government needs a plan soon to clean up the soil around the nuclear facility, he said. The 20-km “no-go” zone remains deserted three months after the disasters, with no clear outlook on when residents may return.

Despite the devastation, evacuees have found solace just by being with each other and in daily rituals such as listening to morning sutras, cooking and cleaning.

Genyu expected large gatherings at summer “Obon” festivals this year, a Buddhist custom with dancing in which families honor the spirits of the deceased. Nearly 24,000 are dead or missing.

“Obon has traditionally been an event that honors everyone. It brings people together and that feeling will be felt more than ever this year,” he said.

“Until people feel they have honored those who passed away, they won’t be able to move on.”

The nuclear disaster has also taught Japanese to rethink materialistic lifestyles and return to a way of life that respects nature and consumes less energy, Genyu said.

“Why do we make things that ignore nature’s cycles, why do we have summer vegetables in the winter?” he asked. Funerals should not have to stick to the custom of using chrysanthemums all-year round if that meant saving energy to grow them.

“Japanese people use paper screens as doors. That is how we have traditionally felt close to light and the wind,” he said.

“Devotion for Buddhism and Shintoism comes from the desire to reap nature’s blessings, even though nature can be frightening. I don’t think we would have those beliefs if we thought we could be completely detached from nature.”

(Reporting by Chisa Fujioka; editing by Elaine Lies)

Kan’s early exit would ease the way for a coalition with the
main opposition party that could enact a bill enabling Japan to
issue more debt to fund this year’s $1 trillion budget.

A coalition between the ruling Democratic Party (DPJ) and
the opposition Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) could also pass an
extra budget to pay for rebuilding parts of the northeast
devastated by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami which killed
about 24,000 people and triggered the world’s worst nuclear
disaster since Chernobyl in 1986.

In a poll by the Mainichi newspaper, 36 percent of voters
said they wanted a coalition of the two biggest parties once Kan
steps down. Only 13 percent favoured a government led by the
ruling DPJ. The same percentage wanted a government led by the
opposition LDP.

A further 33 percent said they would favour another form of
government. This generally refers to a realignment of parties or
support for the handful of smaller groupings in parliament.

Hiromasa Yonekura, chairman of influential business lobby
Nippon Keidanren, also urged the formation of a coalition.

Kan, already unpopular before the quake struck, has seen his
ratings fall due to his perceived mishandling of the recovery
and continuing radiation leaks at the Fukushima nuclear power
plant, where the tsunami knocked out reactor cooling systems.

Kan, Japan’s fifth leader in as many years, survived a
no-confidence motion in parliament last Thursday after promising
critics in his own party he would quit.

He then angered many by hinting he wanted to keep his job
into the new year to deal with the most pressing problems,
especially the radiation crisis.

But with a stalemate in parliament, polls have showed voters
more receptive to the possibility of a grand coalition.

The opposition, which controls parliament’s upper house and
can block bills, has refused to cooperate with the government in
enacting key legislation as long as Kan remains in power.

On Sunday, the DPJ’s No.2 official, Katsuya Okada, said a
temporary coalition would be needed to implement policies given
that the hung parliament might continue until the next upper
house election which must be held by late 2013.

He said on Monday that smaller parties were also potential
partners, not just the LDP.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano called for speedy policy
decisions, but declined to elaborate when asked about the
possibility of a coalition.

“It’s desirable to have a structure in which we have broad
cooperation in parliament,” Edano said. “The party is working
out details.”

LDP leader Sadakazu Tanigaki was quoted by Kyodo news agency
as saying the party would not help a Kan-led government to pass
the bill to issue bonds for this year’s budget.

It is unclear, however, whether a temporary grouping could
tackle longer-term problems, such as huge public debt, now twice
the size of the $5 trillion economy.

While the LDP has called for Kan to quit by the end of the
month, analysts say his departure could take longer.

“None of the contenders has strong public support,” said
Tetsuro Kato, political science professor at Tokyo’s Waseda
University.

Among possible contenders to replace Kan are Finance
Minister Yoshihiko Noda, a fiscal hawk, Deputy Chief Cabinet
Secretary Yoshito Sengoku, who has advocated a coalition with
the LDP, and conservative former foreign minister Seiji Maehara.

(Additional reporting by Shinichi Saoshiro; Editing by Nick
Macfie)