Director of the damaged Japanese nuclear power plant "Fukushima-1" Masao Yoshida is forced to leave his post due to health problems
He is currently in the hospital. Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), which owns the nuclear power plant, insists that the 56-year-old director's illness is not due to radiation exposure. The reasons for Yoshida's hospitalization are unknown.
The director of Fukushima-1 will officially step down from his post on Thursday, but TEPCO said he will continue to work for their company in another position.
Most recently, Maso Yoshida admitted that in the first days after the accident at the nuclear power plant, he and his subordinates were several times close to death. The director opened his heart on November 12 during a meeting with a group of journalists who were first admitted to the territory of Fukushima-1 since the accident.
“The most difficult time was the week after the accident. It was impossible to predict what would happen next. Several times I thought we were going to die,”he said.
TEPCO insists that radiation is not to blame for Yoshida's hospitalization, although the director was on the territory of Fukushima-1 from the moment of the accident and supervised the work to eliminate the consequences of the environmental disaster. His headquarters were located in a fortified building on the territory of the nuclear power plant.
It should be noted that among the 26 journalists who visited the damaged nuclear power plant, only four were foreigners, and three were cameramen and television operators. The only foreign journalist to write was an employee of The New York Times who won the right to a tour in a raffle among Tokyo-accredited foreign news agencies and newspapers.
By the way, it was the American who eventually tarnished the reputation of Japan, which is trying to prove to the whole world that it keeps the situation under control - for this next year, the country's authorities will start distributing 10,000 free air tickets, thereby trying to attract foreign tourists to the country. The journalist said that in a forest located not far from the nuclear power plant, the permissible radiation level was exceeded by five thousand times. But a little later he apologized and clarified that the sensors recorded only 300 microsieverts per hour - this is "only" 850 times higher than the norm.
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And one of the journalists noted that overturned trucks and mountains of rubbish are still lying on the territory of the nuclear facility, part of the territory is still flooded. The walls of the buildings where the reactors are located are damaged, and the collapsed structures and what is left of them lie in front of the buildings.
It is noteworthy that the media representatives traveled around the territory of Fukushima-1 by bus, which they could not leave, and all of them were dressed in protective suits.
The March accident at the Fukushima-1 nuclear power plant, caused by a devastating tsunami, led to a leak of radiation into the air and soil, an increased content of radionuclides was found in water, milk, meat, vegetables, mushrooms, even far from the station. According to the Atomic Energy Commission, 146,000 people had to be evacuated from the 20-kilometer zone around the station.