14 DAY TRIAL // Tepco, otherwise known as Tokyo Electric Power Company, is once again getting loads of media attention and, once again, it's for all the wrong reasons. Long story short, reports say that, this Friday, a man died in a work-related accident at the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan.
The man, whose name has not been released, was 50 years old, and was employed as a contract laborer, Bloomberg informs. It would appear that, at the time of his death, he was busy carrying out excavation work.
More precisely, the publication details that, according to information shared with the public by Tepco, the nuclear plant's operator, the 50-year-old laborer was breaking up concrete around a storage building on the facility's premises.
For reasons yet to be determined, the ground on which the worker was standing collapsed. The man fell in the resulting hole, and was covered by a significant amount of concrete and sediment, Tepco reportedly said in a statement.
Nobody else was injured as a result of this accident, and the 50-year-old worker was eventually pulled from under the concrete and sediment crushing his body by his colleagues. He was unconscious, and remained so despite efforts to revive him.
The man was rushed to the Iwaki Kyoritsu Hospital in Japan's Fukushima prefecture, but, unfortunately, staff here were unable to help him and pronounced him dead as a result of medical complications some three hours after the accident had occurred.
As reported on several occasions, the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan was badly damaged when it was hit by both an earthquake and a tsunami in March 2011. Several nuclear plant workers died at the time when the disaster occurred but, until now, no other work-related death was reported at the facility.
Tepco is yet to offer detailed information concerning the circumstances in which this contract laborer lost his life, but odds are it will soon open up about this incident. It will probably have to seeing how, all things considered, not all that many people will be glad to hear that the ground beneath an already crippled nuclear facility's is now collapsing without warning.
Presently, the nuclear plant operator is busy decommissioning Fukushima. More precisely, efforts are underway to remove fuel assemblies, both spent and unspent ones, from inside Reactor No. 4. Tepco estimated that, should things go according to plan, it would finish removing all the 1,533 fuel assemblies from inside Reactor No. 4 by the end of this year.