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.
