A Japanese man suffered one of the most horrific deaths ever recorded in a case that demonstrates the catastrophic consequences of a nuclear accident, it can be revealed.
Hisashi Ouchi, 35, experienced unimaginable suffering in an 83-day ordeal after being exposed to a record-breaking amount of radiation at work.
His demise saw the entirety of his skin peel away, his eyelids ‘fall off’ and his body produce three litres of diarrhoea every day, as the tissues in his body progressively died.
His ordeal started one fateful day at his workplace, a uranium processing plant in Tokaimura, 70 miles northeast of Tokyo.
He was part of a three-man team preparing uranium to be used as nuclear fuel on September 30, 1999.
However, Ouchi, as well as his colleague Masato Shinohara and supervisor Yutaka Yokokawa added 16kg of uranium into a processor — far higher than the safe limit of 2.4kg.
The trio recalled they saw a sudden blue flash before radiation alarms started blaring and they immediately became ill.
Ouchi, who was stood over the processing container at the time, was exposed to 17,000 millisieverts (mSv) of radiation, the most recorded by any person at a single time.
Hisashi Ouchi, 35, experienced unimaginable suffering in an 83-day ordeal after being exposed to a record-breaking amount of radiation
For context, the safety limit for those working around radiation is 20 mSv per year, with 5,000 mSv considered a fatal dose.
Shinohara absorbed 10,000 mSv while Yokokawa, located a short distance away at a desk, got an estimated 3,000 mSv. All three men were quickly rushed to hospital.
Despite appearing healthy at first, Ouchi steadily deteriorated over the course of a hellish 83 days as the radiation exposure led to his body to become incapable of replacing cells as they died.
One of the first outward changes was sections of his skin falling off while receiving medical care.
He then began to experience breathing problems as fluid built up in his lungs with Ouchi eventually needing a medical ventilator to breathe for him.
Cells in his gut that help absorb food and medication also began to die off.
This led to extreme gastrointestinal pain and discomfort, and him excreting three litres of diarrhoea every day.
The damage to his gut also caused internal bleeding which meant medics needed to give him up to 10 blood transfusions per day to keep him alive.
Dubbed the most ‘radioactive man’ in history, his ordeal started one fateful day at his workplace, a uranium processing plant in Tokaimura, 70 miles northeast of Tokyo. Pictured
The trio recalled they saw a sudden blue flash before radiation alarms started blaring and they immediately became ill. Pictured policemen wearing protective clothing stand guard at a road shortly after the accident
His skin loss kept getting worse and eventually led to him leaking litres upon litres of bodily fluids through his exposed flesh.
Medics attempted multiple treatments for Ouchi including skin grafts and stem cell transplants, but these were unsuccessful.
Even powerful pain killers to keep him more comfortable failed to provide him with much relief.
One particularly horrific change was when his eyelids fell off causing the eyes themselves to become incredibly dry and painful.
Local reports at the time claimed that he began ‘crying blood,’ and begged doctors to stop treating him.
His heart, struggling to keep his body alive, eventually gave out on his 59th day in hospital, but he was resuscitated three times as per his family’s wishes.
The torment would only stop on December 21, his 83rd day in hospital, when he died from multiple organ failure.
A few months later in April 2000 Shinohara, his fellow technician, also died of multiple organ failure aged 40.
Yokokawa was also hospitalised but was released after three months with only minor radiation sickness.
The incident also initiated a series of new legislation in Japan, aimed at tightening requirements around operational safety in the nuclear energy industry.
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
