In Japan the authorities danced fluently between millisieverts per hour for air and becquerels for drinking water. The former is a unit of biological damage; the latter has to do with atomic disintegrations per second. Nobody I met over there could keep them straight.
My friend Dave Golden, who has a finger in every pie, somehow managed to make an appointment for me with Dr. Jean Pouliot, vice-chair of the radiation oncology department at Mount Zion Hospital in San Francisco. Dr. Pouilot was a pleasant man of middle age. With him came a quietly competent, pretty young physicist named Josephine Chen. Dr. Pouilot unlocked the door of a windowless room, picked up a meter the size of a small laptop, and approached a certain metal cabinet whose front bore a radiation warning. The meter did not respond. Nor did my dosimeter. Sighing, he unlocked the cabinet, pulled aside a nest of lead bricks and withdrew a cylindrical object. Still his meter showed nothing; evidently the battery had died. Josephine brought my dosimeter close to the object, and the alarm sounded. I felt pleased. In the quarter-hour we spent in that room, God regaled us with 0.6 heavenly millirems!
“Well, it’s a little high,” said Dr. Pouliot. “Maybe we should put it away.”
His meter being dead, I could not calibrate my dosimeter against it. And given my experience with my neighbor’s orange plate, I had reason to believe that my dosimeter might be insensitive to, or inaccurate in, low ranges. But at least it was doing something. My homework might not be well done, but I hoped to earn an A for diligent intentions.
Dr. Pouilot considered my five-rem ceiling dose a trifle dangerous. When I showed him the page in my incident guide where the EPA recommended it, that tolerant man said that after all, they ought to know what they were doing.
The next day I flew off to Japan, accruing 1.2 millirems (about an eighth of a chest X-ray) in eleven and a half hours.6
II: A STORY ABOUT THINGS WE CAN SCARCELY BELIEVE, LET ALONE UNDERSTAND
~ ~ ~
Devastation in Ishinomaki. Photo by William T. Vollmann
ON MARCH 11, 2011, a 9.0-magnitude temblor struck the eastern coast of Japan’s main island. A tsunami followed. The day before I departed Tokyo for the disaster zone, the casualties had been totted up as follows: killed, 12,175; missing, 15,489; injured, 2,858.7 In the affected area there happened to be a pair of nuclear power plants owned by the Tokyo Electric Power Company, or, in English-language parlance, Tepco. The six-reactor Fukushima Number One Nuclear Plant emerged from the catastrophe with more cracks and leaks than its counterpart a few kilometers south. By the 26th, water in Plant Number One’s second reactor was emitting at least a sievert per hour of radiation.8At this rate, a person would receive that five-rem dose in about three minutes.
The situation seemed unpromising, all the more so since I was not the only ignoramus in Japan:
March 27:
Q. Where did this radioactive water come from?
A. Plant officials and government regulators say they don’t know.9
April 3:
How much water has leaked and for how long was not known as of Saturday afternoon.10
Before I had left for Japan, Peter Bradford, formerly a member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and now serving on the board of trustees of the Union of Concerned Scientists, had said to me: “I’m getting increasingly concerned about the failure of the Japanese public to get accurate information. In the first week I thought the Japanese government was being cautious for good reason. In the third week, there are more and more symptoms that details are being held back. Just now there’s first of all that one extremely high radiation reading, which was declared to be a mistake, and secondly the discovery of iodine-134, which has a very short half-life and would only be present if there’s some recriticality, and they said that’s also a mistake. That’s two mistakes.”
“What would the worst case be?”
“If one of the cores was able to go critical to produce even a small-scale nuclear explosion.”
“How much of Japan would become uninhabitable?”
“It’s hard to say. It depends a lot on the wind. So far the Japanese have been lucky with the winds blowing west to east, out to sea.”
WHY THIS ESSAY IS SHORT ON STATISTICS
ALTHOUGH MY LETTER of press accreditation informed those very few Japanese who were interested that my duties involved “interviewing individuals and officials on behalf of our publication,” I did not see it as my duty to obtain figures on casualties, radiation levels, et cetera, which might well be lies and would certainly be superseded. (The stunning capacity of the Japanese official to say absolutely nothing is matched only by the absurd degree of trust that his public places in him; while the cynical suspicion of the American electorate finds its perfect mate in their officials’ complacent and sometimes even blustering dishonesty.)
Nor could I imagine that “experts” had any more to say about the profoundest questions raised by this continuing tragedy than those who suffered by it. Finally, I could see no benefit in seeking out the people in greatest emotional pain. As you read this account, you will see that my interviewees were, for materially devastated individuals, relatively “lucky.” Only a couple of families had lost members — yet. This selection was less the fruit of my deliberate policy than the consequence of the fact that those not grieving the death of a relative felt more inclined to open their hearts to a stranger; hence I was more likely to encounter them.
However conservatively considerate I imagined this approach to be, it scarcely put me in the clear. My interpreter, to whom I had been close for many years, was sluggish and irritable as I had never seen her; she admitted to being depressed, not to mention enraged at Tepco and her government. Her cousin, who had not met me, expected that I would do harm, and therefore admonished me (a) to interview no one without that Japanese standby, a go-between; (b) to begin by inviting my interviewees to refrain from answering any question they didn’t like; and (c) above all, to pay and pay and pay. I always felt that I was doing just that whenever I visited Japan, being well accustomed to slipping crisp ten-thousand-yen notes into “gratitude envelopes.” Once that would have been a trifle over eighty American dollars; now it was 125. I was willing to keep on disbursing this amount, especially to those in need; my interpreter and her cousin, however, informed me that such a small sum would be “unthinkable.” They expected me to pay at least forty or fifty thousand yen. I dug in my heels, inviting the interpreter to open her heart and add whatever she wished to my envelope, as indeed she did, not without quiet resentment; I’m sure she paid out at least as much as I remitted to her. At length we agreed to disagree. With this ugly episode our work began.
That day and every other I watched the dosimeter, perhaps more frequently than I needed to, but I hardly knew how salubrious each hour might be. The display indeed turned over in increments of 0.1 millirems; there was no in-between. In San Francisco, as I’ve said, it registered that same 0.1 millirems about every twenty-four hours, usually changing sometime during the night. The flight to Japan rewarded me with 1.2 millirems, and the return flight, which was shorter, with 0.8; both of these worked out to more or less a millirem per hour. Tokyo was essentially as radioactive as San Francisco, which pleased me for my own sake and everyone else’s.