In a move that can only be described as obscene, and ironically, or not, as the case may be, put forth on April Fool's Day, Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) has issued a plea for 'jumpers' - a 'hit and run' job that requires little or no training, pays big bucks, and underscores just how dire the situation at the crippled Fukushima plant has become.
But so far, TEPCO has had few takers.
In the April 1st msnbc.msn.com article, '' 'Jumpers' offered big money to brave nuke work' '', one unidentified subcontractor from Iwaki City was quoted as telling the Weekly Post magazine: ''My company offered me 200,000 yen ($2,500) per day. Ordinarily I'd consider that a dream job, but my wife was in tears and stopped me, so I declined. The working time would be less than an hour, so in fact it was 200,000 yen an hour, but the risk was too big.''
In the same article, 27-year old worker Ryuta Fujita was quoted as saying, he was ''offered twice that amount as hazard duty pay to venture into Fukushima Dai-ichi's Reactor 2''. However, Fujita, who'd evacuated and been staying in a sports arena turned shelter with his wife and young son said ''400,000 yen a day wasn't worth it.'' He was also quoted as having said to the Tokyo Shimbun newspaper that, ''I hear that guys older than 50 are being hired at high pay. But I'm still young, and radiation scares me. I don't want to work in a nuclear plant again.''
In a seemingly never ending saga of escalating horrors, it's even more unbelievable that some workers have actually said, ''They feel they are being pressured to take the high-risk jobs at the plant.'' One 41-year-old contractor, whose employer asked him to return to his job of scanning work areas to determine their safety was quoted as having told the Tokyo Shimbun: "It's dangerous work there, I'm sure, but if I refuse, I don't think I would keep my job.''
Another contractor was quoted as saying to the Weekly Post that: ''The reactors may be stopped, but I still have expenses. I have to support my family. And more than anything, if I refuse to go back I'm genuinely afraid I won't get work again.''
To give some perspective, per the same msnbc.msn.com article, ''the average dose for a nuclear plant worker is 50 millisieverts over five years. TEPCO said 18 employees and three contractors were exposed to 100 millisieverts of radiation on Friday.'' Additionally, the article reports that ''levels of radioactive iodine have been found at several thousand times the normal level.''
Wait. There's more.
Apparently - and now I'm showing my age - the job of a jumper used to be common at nuclear power plants in the 70s and 80s.
Rock Nelson, a manager at Nelson Nuclear Corp in Richland, Washington was quoted as saying: ''It's still a job that exists but it's much rarer than in the past.''
At least we've got that going for us.
Forget about the crushing weight of the ethical, legal, social, moral and political ramifications surrounding the job of a 'jumper', for just a moment. On the list of heinous is, in spite of the massive, impressive, instantaneous technology that exists, in spite of the robots that reportedly can perform the job of jumper - but can't because they're unable to navigate the rubble at the debris laden reactor buildings - in spite of all the lofty ideals put forth by the so-called 'experts' and great thinkers of our time, we're literally in the Stone Age when it comes to taming the monster we have created.
''Beware the Jabberwock, my son! The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!''
For three weeks, the world has watched and waited, prayed, grieved, donated, and woke to increasingly grim news reports of the downward spiral described as the world's worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. The crisis has spurned heated debates, knee jerk reactions and stop gap measures among countries and people the world over, quite possibly putting the future of nuclear power on the proverbial chopping block, a gleaming guillotine poised overhead.
No, seriously.
