MOSCOW, May 8 (RIA Novosti) – A former worker at the Fukushima nuclear power plant has filed a lawsuit against Tokyo Electric Power Co., the operator of the crippled plant, claiming that he was heavily exposed to radiation during the disaster, the Asahi Shimbun newspaper reported Thursday.
According to his attorneys, the case is the first lawsuit filed by a Fukushima employee. The 48-year-old worker demanded $107,000 in compensation from TEPCO for issuing negligent instructions that allegedly led to radiation exposure.
“I wish [the utility] had informed us of possible risks in advance,” the worker, whose identity is kept in secret, was quoted as saying during a news conference in Tokyo.
“That is a breach of responsibility to ensure safety. [The utility] put us in a position of being exposed to high doses of radiation unnecessarily,” the man was cited as saying.
“I want [TEPCO] to create safer conditions for workers because the decommissioning of the reactors will not finish anytime soon,” he added.
The complainant claimed he was among six workers of TEPCO who came down to the third Fukushima reactor’s basement only 13 days after it had been heavily flooded following the earthquake and tsunami.
Three of his co-workers who walked through contaminated water were exposed to 180 millisieverts of radiation and hospitalized. The man himself did not enter the water but worked in the basement for an hour and a half. He estimates he received a dose of radiation of a minimum of 20 millisieverts.
The man says that TEPCO knew about the risks of radiation but assured the workers the reactor’s basement was safe. The complainant, however, does not suffer from any health problems.
In March 2011, Japan was hit by a massive magnitude 9.0 earthquake and subsequent tsunami, claiming more than 15,000 lives and causing a number of explosions at the Fukushima plant. In what has been dubbed the world's worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl, three of the plant’s reactors underwent a partial meltdown as radiation leaked into the atmosphere, soil and seawater.
