福岛之觞：揭秘核泄露内幕

    菅直人说，他告诉清水正孝，他们需要在东电总部设立一个核电联合小组，以提高联络效率。为了彰显对局势的重视，清水正孝刚一走，菅直人也立即驱车前往东京电力公司总部。

    在早上5点45分左右，菅直人对包括总裁清水正孝和董事长胜俣恒久在内的200多名东电员工做了讲话，他说，他知道他们正面临一个“艰难的时刻”。

    在全厂失电发生后的几天里，福岛第一核电站现场的工人们想尽一切办法应对混乱和继续恶化的局面。他们爬到被摧毁得面目全非的核电站停车场上收集汽车电瓶，希望用它来发电打开反应堆的阀门。

    后来政府下达了对反应堆安全壳进行泄压的命令，以减小反应堆内积累的压力。工人们吞下碘化钾药片，然后他们被告知只有17分钟的工作时间，以免在危险的高辐射环境下暴露太长时间。

    负责这项高危任务的是东电公司在危机现场的尖兵、福岛第一核电站站长吉田雅夫。在危机的头几天，由于菅直人和东京的其他决策人员在各种信息中举棋不定，让吉田深感沮丧。

    吉田比任何人更明白，把水灌入反应堆和乏燃料池，是当前最需要发生的事。在危机发生已经超过一天后，一号反应堆也在一次氢气爆炸中严重受损，这时东京的决策层却在“再临界”问题上纠结起来，可谓不分轻重——至少在吉田看来是这样的。

    实现“冷停堆”是当时的努力方向，菅直人则想知道已经暴露的堆心是否仍在产生裂变反应，因而使问题复杂化了（而直到今天，福岛第一核电站仍然保持着冷停堆状态）。据日本知名记者船桥洋一领导的独立调查委员会公布的细节来看，当时的讨论不知怎么纠结在了是否应该向反应堆泵入海水的问题上。

    由于福岛第一核电站的局势迅速恶化，吉田雅夫认为东京的这种讨论纯属浪费时间。船桥洋一的独立调查委员会报告写道，当时吉田雅夫与清水正孝和东电的政府首席联络官武黑一郎进行了电话会议，结果总部要求吉田暂缓对暴露的反应堆喷洒海水。在吉田看来，这在当时完全是个错误的决定。

    因此在电话会议期间，吉田向另一名员工做了个手势，对他低声耳语道：哪怕一会儿他下令中止向反应堆喷洒海水——好让东京的官员们在电话里能听见——他也想让现场的所有人知道，他们应该对那个命令置之不理。因为反应堆必须要喷水降温，否则他们就会陷入更加被动的境地。

    Kan said he then told the Shimizu that they needed to set up a joint nuclear task force at the company's headquarters, so lines of communication might be improved. Kan wanted to reinforce the message at TEPCO, and so he drove to the headquarters shortly after Shimizu had left.

    At around 5:45 that morning, he addressed some 200 TEPCO employees, including Shimizu and the chairman, Tsunehisa Katsumata, and told them that he knew they faced "a tough moment."

    In the days that followed the station blackout, many of TEPCO's on site workers went to extraordinary lengths to cope with the chaotic and deteriorating situation. They scrambled to the site's parking lots and scavenged car batteries to try to generate power to open key valves at the reactors.

    When the government gave the orders to vent the primary containment vessels of the operating reactors, an important step to diminish the pressure building up inside, workers popped potassium iodide tablets and were told they had only 17 minutes to work, lest they be exposed for too long to radiation levels that were dangerously high.

    The man at the center of this, TEPCO's point man during the crisis, was Masao Yoshida, the site manager at Fukushima Daiichi. He had also been frustrated in the firstdays of the crisis by what he felt was bad information Kan and other key people in Tokyo were getting.

    Yoshida understood better than anyone involved that getting water onto the reactors and into the spent fuel pools was the most important thing that needed to happen. But at one point, more than a day into crisis and—after a hydrogen explosion had already damaged reactor unit one—the powers that be in Tokyo got sidetracked, at least in Yoshida's view, by a discussion about "re-criticality."

    Kan wanted to know whether the exposed core could still create a fissile reaction, complicating the effort to achieve a "cold shut-down" (which to this day remains the ultimate end game at Fukushima Daiichi.) According to the detailed account of an independent investigative commission led by Yoichi Funabashi, one of Japan's most respected journalists, the discussion somehow got tangled up with the question of whether to try to pump seawater into the reactors.

    Yoshida, with the situation at the plant deteriorating rapidly, thought this discussion was a complete waste of time. He was thus stunned, according to the Funabashi Commission report, when on a conference call with Shimizu and TEPCO's chief liaison with the government, Ichiro Takekuro, he was told to delay the spraying of seawater onto the exposed reactors.

    This, in Yoshida's view, was exactly the wrong thing to do at that moment.

    So during the call, Yoshida motioned another employee over and whispered to him that even though he would now order a halt to the seawater injections—so the officials in Tokyo could hear him doing so on the phone—he wanted everyone at the site to understand that they should disregard that order. Seawater needed to be sprayed onto the site—or they were going to be in worse trouble than they were already.