A blue flash filled the room at 10:35 in the morning. No one at the time understood what it meant, but that light—Cherenkov radiation—signaled that something had been broken forever.
Hisashi Ouchi, a 35-year-old technician at the JCO plant in Tokaimura, Japan, absorbed 17 sieverts of radiation on September 30, 1999, more than triple the dose considered fatal. They had used steel buckets instead of the official tank to meet a delivery deadline. By the seventh bucket, the uranium reached critical mass and unleashed a chain reaction.
At the University of Tokyo Hospital, doctors saw something they had never seen before: his chromosomes were destroyed, his bone marrow was little more than scattered dots on an image. His body could no longer produce its own cells. They gave him experimental transplants, skin grafts, daily transfusions. Nothing worked. On day 59, he suffered three cardiac arrests in one hour. He told the doctors: “I can’t take it anymore. I am not a guinea pig.” He died 83 days after the accident, on December 21, 1999, from multiple organ failure.
