Drawing further scorn from Japanese regulators, Tokyo Electric Power Co. has said it cannot find a number of subcontractor employees who worked at the Fukuhsima Daiichi nuclear plant in the early days of the crisis. The utility recently checked the radiation exposure of nearly all of the 3,639 people who worked at the site between the station blackout and March 31, but TEPCO said 69 could not be located.
Among the plant systems knocked out by the March 11 tsunami was a database tracking the radiation doses of plant employees. Quoting Japanese ministries monitoring the accident, the Asahi Shimbun reported Wednesday that the company reverted to a system wherein TEPCO employees and subcontractors simply wrote their names and employers on a piece of paper whenever they checked out a dosimeter. Employees did not have to show photo identification as part of the process until the end of March, at the earliest, the paper reported.
TEPCO does not even have names for 30 people who worked at the plant, and the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare suspects they either listed the wrong company or falsified their information on the sheet. As the labor ministry demanded that TEPCO find the missing workers for health checks, the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency accused TEPCO of putting the site at risk of a terrorist attack by allowing unidentified people to enter the plant.
The labor industry reported that TEPCO recently told subcontracting companies to send people who had worked at Fukushima to TEPCO facilities for internal radiation checks, but some companies ignored the request or indicated they had not sent employees to the plant.