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DANGER: YOU ARE NOW ENTERING FUKUSHIMA, YEAR 3.

HIGH RADIATION RISK AHEAD.

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I got a phone call one day from my boss, an overweight, middle-aged publisher of a small, weekly newspaper in my town in southern California, to go to a nearby hospital and interview some person for a story. The guy had something to say about some kind of nuclear accident, my boss said, look into it.

A young cub reporter in my early 20s, fresh to the scene and always hungry for a scoop, I called the man at the hospital and made an appointment. It was circa 1980-1981, and the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in Pennsylvania in 1979 was still a hot news topic in the United States. A nationwide grassroots anti-nuclear movement was then being born. I was curious about what the man at the hospital wanted to talk about.

On the Case

So, on the day I packed my tape recorder and notebook and set off for the hospital. My idea was to just listen to what he had to say, see if there was a story there. Sometimes it happened that when you interviewed somebody, there was no real news story at all; they just wanted to get their name and face into our fledgling little community newspaper. Sometimes a story could turn out to be a big waste of a reporter’s time.

I asked for the room number at the hospital front desk, found it and slowly entered. I looked around and saw a few beds with patients in them, wondering which person was the one I was supposed to talk to. Then, a patient sitting upright and propped up by pillows caught my eye, looking as if he had been expecting me. I walked over and, at his invitation, pulled up a chair next to his bed and nightstand. We went through the usual greetings and polite chatter. I got out my notebook, and he started to tell me his story.

He had been a worker at a nuclear power plant on the northeast U.S.-Canadian border, he said, and one day the power plant had had a major accident. The plant came within a hair’s breadth of a nuclear meltdown, he said.

The word “meltdown” was then being talked about in the U.S., thanks in great part to the popularity of the Hollywood film The China Syndrome — which, by pure coincidence, had been showing in theaters a couple weeks before the actual Three Mile Island accident occurred. The movie portrayed in detail the very same kind of accident that did happen soon after at TMI. The movie also portrayed how the news media were used to both promote nuclear power and also to cover up its very real dangers to the public.

I jotted down scattered notes and listened attentively to the hospital patient as he talked. He was dark-haired, slightly balding, maybe in his mid-40s, gaunt and a bit pale. He had hospital tubes sticking in him and hanging off his hospital bed. He spoke almost monotonously, showing little emotion, keeping his voice low as if he did not want to be overheard by the other patients in the room. He seemed to be cautious and a bit wary of me. He was clearly very ill.

A meltdown? Was it a full meltdown? I asked. No, he replied, but it came very close to being one. The nuclear power plant workers managed to get it under control at the last moment. If it had been a full meltdown, he said, it would have been a cataclysmic disaster and people living in that region in both Canada and the United States would have been helpless to escape the radioactive cloud covering their cities.

Even though the workers had saved the plant from a full meltdown, he said, lots of radiation had been still released from the plant into the atmosphere. It was still out there floating around. Some workers at the plant, in trying to save it from exploding, had also received heavy doses of radiation to their bodies. He was one of them.

Incredulous at what I was hearing and stumbling for words, I asked him, “How long do you think it will take before the public finds out about it?” The man laughed for the first and only time in the interview, apparently at my naiveté. His exact words were: “No one will ever know”. The U.S. and Canadian governments, he said, would make sure of that.

So the two governments knew about it? Sure, he said, they knew everything; they had been briefed about it immediately after the accident. But the two governments were colluding to make sure the information never got out to the public. And so far, he said, they had been successful.

Now I understood why I was there and why he wanted to talk.

We talked a while and, sensing he was becoming fatigued, I politely excused myself, thanking him for his time. We agreed to meet again in the near future. Most definitely, there was a big story here and I had so many questions that I still wanted to ask him.

Questions like: Exactly how had the accident happened, step by step? Why was he in a hospital on the opposite of the United States, far from where his nuclear plant had been located? (I wasn’t sure at that point whether he was a Canadian or U.S. citizen.) What medical condition was he suffering from and would he be recovering soon? What happened to his other co-workers at the plant? Were they sick too? Exactly what steps were being taken to cover this up by the two governments? And most importantly, why was he taking such a big risk to talk about this? Was he worried about his own personal safety?

I walked out of that hospital kind of shaken, but frankly, also excited. This had to be a Big One, the kind of story every young reporter dreams of getting and having published so that the public could know the truth and do something about it (Watergate then being a recent example). I looked forward to talking with the man again and hopefully getting his story out, even if it was in a small way through a local community newspaper like ours.

Off the Story

But it was not to be. I got another phone call from my boss at the newspaper a few days later. Forget the story about the guy at the hospital, he said, we’ve got another story for you. Work on this other one instead.

Still young and green and not wanting to make waves, I followed the editorial order. I never heard anything further about the man at the hospital and I never met him again.

But my mind was racing with questions: Why the sudden removal from the story that the publisher himself had thought was so important in the first place? After all, he was a typical Republican Party type; did this kind of potentially explosive story somehow offend his patriotic, right-wing sensibilities? Was my big story being killed before it ever saw the light of day? Or was it that the man at the hospital was too sick to talk any more? Or had he already died? And I also considered another distant possibility: Had the man at the hospital been found out as talking to the press and then somehow “neutralized” as a way of keeping him quiet? After all, Karen Silkwood, another U.S. nuclear power plant worker, had died under similar circumstances just a few years before.

I never knew what happened to the man at the hospital. And I regretted later on that I hadn’t at least questioned or challenged my boss at the paper about pulling me off the story. If I had been sneaky enough, I could even have gone back to the hospital on my own and continued pursuing the story as a freelancer and given the story to some other paper. But at the time, I did have a sense of loyalty to the small weekly newspaper that was giving me my first real job in journalism (at no pay, mind you), so I moved on as I was told.

Many years later — long after I had left the small newspaper, gone on to journalism school at university and entered the corporate media world — I found out that my former boss at that paper had been exposed by the local press as being involved in a plagiarism scam that ended up financially ruining him, breaking up his marriage and, later on, presumably contributing to his death at a relatively young age. It was a big disappointment to learn about it, but in the end I had little empathy for him. He had broken all the rules of honest journalism and paid the price for it.

But whatever things that former boss of mine did wrong (and there apparently many), one thing he did do right was this: sending me to the hospital that day to interview that dying nuclear power plant worker, for that was the story that went on to change my life and teach me a valuable firsthand lesson about not letting the story of a victim, any victim, just die in silence.

By the time the Chernobyl accident occurred in April 1986, I was myself an editor-in-chief of a small weekly community newspaper in central California and recalled the words of that nuclear plant worker at the hospital some years before. And many more years on, when the Fukushima nuclear accident happened in March 2011 and it was clear that a cover-up by the authorities here in Japan was well underway, the words came back to me again full-flush: “No one will ever know”.

The one nuclear-related news story of mine that never made into print was the one story of my career in journalism that has haunted me ever since. I’ve never forgotten that man at the hospital more than three decades ago and I don’t suppose I ever will.

I haven’t yet been to the Fukushima area to cover the scene, mostly out of respect for the victims and the media invasion they faced immediately after the accident. But when I eventually do make it to Fukushima, I’ll bring with me the memory of a dying nuclear plant worker in the U.S. and his desire to tell the truth, and make it real. I want to make sure not only that someone knows but that everyone knows — and that suppressing the truth, however it happens, will not be tolerated.

But most of all, I want to make sure that people’s wishes to tell the truth about what nuclear power has done to them and to the world will never, ever be in vain.

REMINDER: YOU ARE STILL IN FUKUSHIMA, YEAR 3.

NOT TO WORRY. NO ONE WILL EVER KNOW.

HAVE A NICE DAY.