The first team succeeded and quickly withdrew. But as the second team entered, their "dose rates" — their exposure to radiation—immediately spiked. One of the operators was instantly exposed to 106 millisieverts of radiation, above the 100 "emergency dose limit" mandated by TEPCO.
The team was pulled out immediately, having failed to open the necessary valves to reduce pressure in the reactor. It took until 2:30 that afternoon—almost 24 hours after the earthquake —for venting of reactor one to commence.
Just over an hour later, at 3:36, the massive explosion shook the site.
Over the next three days, two more hydrogen blasts followed, one at reactor three, and one at unit four, which had been offline at the time of the tsunami.
In the desperate days just after the accident, there was no single event or decision that brought the situation back from the brink. Yoshida's decision to ignore the order against spraying seawater was important. The eventual ability of the Japanese military, police and fire department units, using multiple water cannons and fire trucks, to get to the site and douse it with seawater prevented the crisis from becoming even worse.
If there was a making-it-up-as-they-went-along quality to the effort, it's because they were: the defense forces didn't even have a site map for Fukushima Daiichi when its personnel first arrived.
Still, starting from about March 17, Kan told Fortune he felt "we were creating a defense line, we were pushing back against the enemy.'' Radiation levels, while still high, had stopped increasing. Days later some electricity was finally restored to the site.
But it would be a long time before Kan or anyone else felt any sense of relief. On July 19th, TEPCO said it believed it had stabilized the temperature inside the reactors -- an important step toward the goal of "cold shutdown." That was the first day, Kan says, when he could effectively exhale, when he thought "the worst was over."
The Funabashi commission report points out in withering detail that the Japanese government never gave its citizens a realistic sense of just how long it would take to get control of the disabled plant, nor what the ongoing risks were as radiation continued to be emitted from the site. Arguably, it still hasn't.
On December 16, Kan's successor, Yoshihiko Noda, announced that the stricken reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station had reached "a state of cold shutdown." Japan's worst-ever nuclear accident, the Prime Minister said, had finally been brought under control.
The moment was meant to be a calming milestone, psychological balm for a wounded country in the process of trying to heal. The only problem with it, as workers today at the nuclear power plant, will tell you, is this: it wasn't true then, and it's still not true today. "The coolant water is keeping the reactor temperatures at a certain level, but that's not even near the goal [of a cold shut down,]" says an engineer working inside the plant. "The fact is, we still don't know what's going on inside the reactors."
