Hisashi Ouchi, who died an extremely painful death as a result of the Tokaimura Nuclear Incident of 1999
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Hisashi Ouchi, who died an extremely painful death as a result of the Tokaimura Nuclear Incident of 1999. Hisashi Ouchi was a handsome, powerfully built, former high school rugby player with a wife and young son when he was exposed to what was probably the highest dose of accidental radiation in history. On the morning of Sept. 30, 1999, at a nuclear fuel-processing plant in Tokaimura, Japan, 35-year-old Hisashi Ouchi and two other workers were purifying uranium oxide to make fuel rods for a research reactor. As this account published a few months later in The Washington Post details, Ouchi was standing at a tank, holding a funnel, while a co-worker named Masato Shinohara poured a mixture of intermediate-enriched uranium oxide into it from a bucket. Suddenly, they were startled by a flash of blue light, the first sign that something terrible was about to happen. The workers, who had no previous experience in handling uranium with that level of enrichment, inadvertently had put too...