Hisashi Ouchi was a husband and father. He was remembered as handsome and physically fit, having played rugby during his younger years.
Yet Hisashi was woefully inadequately trained when he was tasked with handling extremely dangerous uranium at his Japanese nuclear facility, resulting in what has been described as "the most agonising death ever documented".
Ouchi was left "burned from the inside out", with his skin falling away and his tissue gradually deteriorating, and was maintained alive for 83 horrific days against his wishes.
He continually pleaded with doctors to end his suffering, but was persistently subjected to experimental procedures and treatments even after there remained no possibility of his recovery.
Ouchi, 35, was a senior technician at Tokaimura uranium processing facility in Japan, roughly 110km northeast of Tokyo. The facility already had a track record of negligence – in 1997, a blaze at Tokaimura exposed 37 staff members to elevated levels of radiation – when Ouchi encountered his horrifying ordeal, reports the Mirror.
On September 30, 1999, Ouchi was exposed to 17,000 millisieverts (mSv) of radiation whilst carrying out his duties.
That is 850 times the safe annual dose for nuclear facility workers, 140 times what people living near to Chernobyl were exposed to following the 1986 catastrophe, and the highest dose ever recorded in human history.
The exposure was again caused by negligence from facility operators. During standard operations, Ouchi's colleague Masato Shinohara and supervisor Yutaka Yokokawa poured seven times the correct amount of uranium into a processing tank.
This triggered an uncontrolled nuclear chain reaction known as a criticality accident, instantly releasing lethal radiation across the entire facility.
Ouchi, whose body had been positioned over the processing tank at the moment of the incident whilst assisting his colleague to fill the vessel, received the most severe exposure.
Source: Daily Express :: World Feed
