Short Stuff: Hisashi Ouchi

00:00:04 Speaker 1: Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's sitting in for Dave, and this is Short Stuff, a really sad edition. 00:00:13 Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure, because this is about a nuclear accident, and one very famous victim of that accident, a man in Japan named Hisashi Ouchi. 00:00:24 Speaker 1: Mm-hmm. 00:00:25 Speaker 2: Who at the time was a 35-year-old worker at a nuclear facility. And he got a massive blast of radiation in 1999. It was called a criticality accident. And what was the name of the town? 00:00:43 Speaker 1: In Takaimura. Takaimura. Okay, great. 00:00:47 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:00:47 Speaker 1: Or no, Tokaimura, sorry. And that's called the Tokaimura nuclear accident is what it's called. And like you said, it was a criticality because there wasn't like a nuclear explosion or anything like that. It was an uncontrolled nuclear fission reaction that these guys accidentally created while they were doing their job processing uranium oxide into usable uranium-235 fuel to be used in an actual nuclear reactor. This is not a nuclear plant. It was the kind of plant that produces fuel for nuclear plants. 00:01:23 Speaker 2: That's right. This is the morning of September 30th, 1999. And what they specifically were doing in that moment was they were dissolving that uranium oxide, like you were saying. And this was the procedure. What I'm describing now is the approved procedure, actually. Yeah, right. So they were supposed to have dissolved that uranium oxide in a geometrically safe vessel. And then what you end up with is uranyl nitrite solution. And you put that into a buffer tank and then transfer, you know, little bits of that into a precipitation tank. This company, is it JCO is the name of the company? 00:02:05 Speaker 1: Yeah. 00:02:06 Speaker 2: They said, all right, we're going to speed this up. And this procedure is not approved. But what we want you guys to do is mix the solution in stainless steel buckets and then pour it directly into the precipitation tank. 00:02:20 Speaker 1: And not only pour it directly in the precipitation tank, pour so much in there that we have like five to six times the approved amount in that precipitation tank at once, right? 00:02:32 Speaker 2: I think there's like seven times. Okay. 00:02:34 Speaker 1: A lot, a lot more than was supposed to be in there. And I just want to point out, like you were saying, there was an approved procedure and JCO said, nuts to that. We're going to do this faster one. Right. That's just what they were doing with their workers. It's crazy because this is nuclear uranium 235 fuel that they're making. And so when they put in these three workers, including Hisashi Ouchi, when they put in the seventh bucket of this stuff into the directly in the precipitation tank, There were 16.6 …