Nuclear mattersU.S. General: troops unprepared for nuke risks in Japan

A U.S. general admitted that U.S. troops stationed in Japan did not have the proper training or equipment to handle radiation exposure in the days immediately following the nuclear crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant caused by the 11 March earthquake and tsunami.

Speaking before members of the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan on Wednesday, Lieutenant General Burton M. Field, the commander of U.S. forces in Japan, said that troops were not initially prepared to handle the radiation risks posed by the radioactive plume of smoke released by reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.

“As the reactors exploded and they sent some of that radiation out, we had the issue with it being detected off shore by the Navy,” he said. “We had to start dealing with the kind of environment that the U.S. military had not really worked in, so we didn’t have the strictest guidelines on what kind of risk we would take in terms of radiation exposure for our (service) members.”

General Field explained that in the beginning, troops were not sure of the containment procedures they would have to use for equipment that was going to be exposed to radiation.

“We had really no idea of the level which that contamination was going to rise to and the radiation was going to rise to,” he said. “The impact it was going to have in the short or long term was uncertain.”

Initially steps to measure radiation in the affected areas were ad-hoc and improvised.

When Department of Energy personnel arrived at Yokota Air Base in Japan with radiation measuring equipment capable of monitoring the amount of radiation on the ground from an aircraft, troops had to “[figure] out how to strap these things on airplanes and helicopters.”

“We asked the pilots: ‘Okay, we are going to have you fly into weird and wonderful places that might have a lot of radiation. Who’s in?’” General Field said.

According to the general, all the pilots who flew missions volunteered themselves.

The U.S. military has not released any data on the levels of radiation or toxic substances that military personnel were exposed to, but last week U.S. Rear Admiral Michael H. Mittelman, U.S. Pacific Command’s top medical officer, said that “internal monitoring” of radiation levels for the 7,700 troops who worked nearest to the damaged nuclear plant revealed that the overwhelming majority had not been exposed to elevated levels of radiation.

The study found that 98 percent of personnel had no signs of elevated radiation inside their bodies and the remaining 2 percent had at most been exposed to twenty-five millirems, the equivalent of 2.5 chest x-rays.

Furthermore, in a series of town hall meetings at military bases in Japan, Mittelman said that he plans to calculate the radiation doses received by each of the approximately 61,000 military personnel living and working in Japan at the time of the 11 March disaster.

Reflecting back on what he would have done better, General Field said, “I would have been a lot smarter on the effect of radiation on humans, plants, animals, fish, ocean, land, air, soil, kids…”

“I had zero idea about nuclear reactors before. I could probably teach a course in nuclear reactors and nuclear physics medicine at this point.”