by LUCY CRAFT
They are all retirees, and they have all volunteered for a single, dangerous mission: to replace younger workers at the badly damaged Fukushima nuclear plant.
The Skilled Veterans Corps for Fukushima consists of more than 500 seniors who have signed up for a job that has been called courageous — and suicidal.
Kazuko Sasaki, a 72-year-old grandmother, is one of those ready to serve.
“My generation built these nuclear plants. So we have to take responsibility for them. We can’t dump this on the next generation,” she says.
The founder of Skilled Veterans is Yasuteru Yamada, a slight, soft-spoken man of 72.
An engineer who has spent his life around industrial plants, Yamada says he and his retired colleagues quickly realized after the March 11 disaster that conditions at Fukushima were far bleaker than the government was letting on.
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Yamada’s gray volunteers have received admiring coverage from around the world, and yet they have been all but ignored by the Japanese media, which doesn’t seem to take them seriously.
NPR for more
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