The Darkest Hours
In the wee hours of the morning of March 15, 2011 TEPCO President Masataka Shimizu sat in the back of his company car, threading his way through the deserted streets of Tokyo. It had been three days since a massive earthquake—9.0 on the Richter scale—and a series of tsunamis had utterly devastated northeastern Japan. No natural disaster had ever been greater, but for Shimizu, whose company operated the massive Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, an epic crisis had only begun.
He had been summoned to the office of Naoto Kan, then Prime Minister of Japan. Kan was furious: As horrific as the damage from the quake and tsunami was, Japan now faced the prospect of the worst nuclear accident in human history. At TEPCO's Fukushima Daiichi power station, massive hydrogen explosions had already damaged two of the three reactors that had been operating on March 11, releasing dangerous levels of radiation into the atmosphere. (The three other reactors at the power station had offline at the time for routine maintenance.) The nuclear fuel in the three reactors that were operating appeared to be melting down.
The scene at the plant site, about 160 miles northeast of Tokyo, was nothing short of apocalyptic: small fires blazed at the damaged reactors, the smoke mixing with the steam that they were releasing. Radiation levels would eventually spike so high that the plant's emergency off-site center five kilometers away had to be evacuated; astonishingly, the building was not designed to withstand elevated radiation levels, even though its precise purpose was to serve as a backup operations center during a nuclear emergency.
For three agonizing days, conditions at the Fukushima Daiichi site had been steadily deteriorating; and TEPCO, at least in the eyes of senior government officials, had not given any sign of being able to get control of the situation.
To the contrary, former Prime Minister Kan (he resigned in August) tells Fortune that the TEPCO called Tokyo's minister of economy, trade and industry and told him TEPCO wanted to withdraw from the site completely—a staggering admission of defeat that immediately conjured up images of an uncontained nuclear meltdown; a worst case scenario, in other words, of potentially lethal proportions.
Shimizu also called Kan's chief cabinet secretary, insisting: "We cannot hold onto the site!"
At roughly the same time, Goshi Hosono, who would become the Japanese government's point man during the nuclear crisis, called TEPCO's on site plant manager, Masao Yoshida, and asked if he too thought Fukushima Daiichi needed to be abandoned. Yoshida appeared to push back against Shimizu, his boss, saying, "we can still hold on, but we need weapons, like a high-pressure water pump."
Kan had been increasingly frustrated by the lack of what he felt was reliable information about the state of the nuclear crisis since its onset; he compared it to "playing the telephone game." At 4 a.m., he ordered an aide to call Shimizu back and instruct him to come to his office.
