A worker died at Japan’s disaster-stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant on Saturday as emergency crews continued their operations to prevent a major meltdown, the plant’s operator said.
The male worker in his 60s was confirmed dead after he was rushed to hospital after falling unconscious at the plant in the morning, Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) spokesman Yoshinori Mori said.
When he was taken ill, the unidentified worker was carrying chainsaws with another worker inside a facility to treat contaminated water being released from the plant’s crippled reactors, the official said.
“He was exposed to 0,17 millisieverts of radiation during the work. But, as he was wearing protective gear, no radioactive substances were detected on his body,” Mori said, adding there were no signs of injury on the worker.
“We have yet to determine the cause of his death,” the official added.
The reading on his dosimeter was far below the company’s safety threshold of five millisieverts.
The giant ocean wave triggered by the massive magnitude-9 seabed quake on March 11 knocked out the plant’s water cooling systems, leading fuel rods inside several reactors to partially melt and sparking explosions.
The unidentified worker was the first to die at the Fukushima plant since two male employees were found dead with external injuries at a damaged turbine building immediately after the natural disaster, the official said.
Amid fears of what they described as an “invisible enemy”, emergency crews have since doused reactors and fuel rod pools with water to stop them from overheating and releasing far greater amounts of radiation.
Many cases of heat stroke have been reported among workers, the daily Mainichi Shimbun reported on Saturday.
Tecpco hopes to bring the plant into stable “cold shutdown” some time between October and January. — AFP