I say send them to prison

As has been reported by Japan Today and other sources, a contract worker has come forward to file legal charges against the Tokyo Electric Power Corporation (or a subcontractor) for sending workers into areas of dangerously high radiation levels in the days just after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster.

According to the article, Tepco sent the worker and a team of six into the basement of reactor 3 on March 24th, just 10 days after the top of the building went up in a massive explosion. They were given protective gear and boots, and told to reconnect power cables in the flooded area.

Shinichi, the worker filing charges who only agreed to the interview on the condition they wouldn't release his picture out of a justifiable fear of discrimination, refused to enter steaming hot radioactive water in the gloomy basement because he'd been only given short boots. He suffered a reported dose of 20 millisieverts. The men who went in, however, got soaked to their ankles in the contaminated water and suffered a high enough dose to get beta burns on their feet (estimated around 180 millisieverts, though I would guess much higher - according to one source they say they got 2 to 6 sieverts on their feet, much worse though not enough to kill you outright because it was hitting their feet).

Now he is filing for charges for violations of safety standards laws. The maximum penalty is a measly 500,000 yen and six months in jail, and even if the charges did stick I'm not sure who the penalty would go to.

I think that while the workers may not have been aware of the exact level of danger they surely had to know the situation was bad there. And I and all of Japan (and the world for that matter) should be pretty damn thankful for their sacrifices. Surely some of the workers sent to the plants will get sick because of this in the years down the road, and I'm sure some will develop cancer, heart problems and other illnesses and it will surely cost lives. Other people living downwind of the plants will also surely suffer from it. And there have already been a number of deaths in temporary housing shelters and during the evacuation that wouldn't have happened had the disaster ended with the tsunami and not involved the nuke plants going sky high. The deaths on record may not be directly radiation caused, but they could've been avoided.

IMO this lawsuit is one way to try to get justice. Maybe if a thousand plant workers come forward we can get a stack of the same kind of lawsuit coming in.

Furthermore anyone with even a slight inkling that the plant could be in danger but didn't act should see the inside of a jail cell. Because they contributed to the ruination of tens or hundreds of thousands of lives, and the deaths of thousands (plus who knows how many that'll appear over the years). I can see people down the road hiring detectives to find out if a prospective husband or wife was exposed to radiation. I can see kids getting sick in schools that should've been evacuated but weren't. The problems will arise again and again. It is not over. But we can try, maybe, to take to task the people who helped make all this happen.

Update: Alas it seems my big dream is all for naught. Tepco itself isn't being sued, just the subcontractor who was directly in charge of the workers who waded into the pool. Thanks to EXSKF for adding more information. As always this site is an invaluable source of info, links and insight.