Short Stuff: Hisashi Ouchi

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1:40Chuck Bryant:Hey, and welcome to The Short Stuff. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's sitting in for Dave, and this is Short Stuff, a really sad addition.

1:49Josh Clark:Yeah, for sure. Because this is about a nuclear accident. And one very famous victim of that accident, a man in Japan named Hisashi Ouchi, who at the time was a 35-year-old worker at a nuclear facility. and he got a massive blast of radiation in 1999. It was called a criticality accident. And what was the name of the town?

2:21Chuck Bryant:In Takaimura.

2:22Josh Clark:Takaimura, okay, great.

2:24Chuck Bryant:Yeah, or no, Takaimura, sorry. And that's called the Takaimura nuclear accident is what it's called. And like you said, it was a criticality because there wasn't like a nuclear explosion or anything like that. It was an uncontrolled nuclear fission reaction that these guys accidentally created while they were doing their job processing uranium oxide into usable uranium-235 fuel to be used in an actual nuclear reactor. This is not a nuclear plant. It was the kind of plant that produces fuel for nuclear plants.

3:00Josh Clark:That's right. This is the morning of September 30th, 1999. And what they specifically were doing in that moment was they were dissolving that uranium oxide, like you were saying. And this was the procedure. What I'm describing now is the approved procedure, actually.

3:19Chuck Bryant:Right.

3:19Josh Clark:So they were supposed to have dissolved that uranium oxide in a geometrically safe vessel. And then what you end up with is urinal nitrite solution. and you put that into a buffer tank and then transfer, you know, little bits of that into a precipitation tank. This company, is it JCO is the name of the company?

3:42Chuck Bryant:Yeah.

3:43Josh Clark:They said, all right, we're going to speed this up and this procedure is not approved. But what we want you guys to do is mix the solution in stainless steel buckets and then pour it directly into the precipitation tank.

3:56Chuck Bryant:And not only pour it directly in the precipitation tank, pour so much in there that we have like five to six times the approved amount in that precipitation tank at once, right? I think it's like seven times. Okay. A lot. A lot more than was supposed to be in there. And I just want to point out, like you were saying, there was an approved procedure and JCO said, nuts to that. We're going to do this faster one, right? That's just what they were doing with their workers. It's crazy because this is nuclear uranium-235 fuel that they're making. And so when they put in these three workers, including Hisashi Ouchi, when they put in the seventh bucket of this stuff directly in the precipitation tank, there were 16.6 kilos or 36.6 pounds of uranium in there, which is way more than was allowed to be in there.

4:49Chuck Bryant:I think it was 2.4 keys or kilograms that was allowed to be in there. And they had 16.6, Chuck.

4:56Josh Clark:Yeah. So that reached critical mass pretty quickly and started a self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction. And like you said, it wasn't like an explosion or anything like that, but it was a huge burst of neutron and gamma radiation, like incredible Hulk levels.

5:14Chuck Bryant:Yeah.

5:14Josh Clark:And it went on and off for about 20 hours until the emergency workers finally drained water from the tank's cooling jacket and then added boric acid to absorb the neutrons. But, you know, very sadly, Ouchi received a dose equivalent of 17 sieverts. It's kind of hard to, like, get an exact calculation, but it was an incredibly large amount of radiation. like so much that they have he's been called the most radioactive man in history, which is a bit of a misnomer because he had this burst of radiation, but it's not like he was walking around like radioactive to other people or anything like that.

5:54Chuck Bryant:It's a little surprising to me, but OK, well, I'll take that. I did a little bit of Josh math here, Chuck. Oh, boy. Well, it's not even Josh math. It's more Josh checking. Okay. So you said that Oichi receives 17 sieverts of radiation, right? Okay, yeah. So one mil... I'm not laughing at that.

6:14Josh Clark:I'm laughing at your math, by the way.

6:16Chuck Bryant:No, I understand. Yeah. One millirem is equal to 0.00001 sieverts, okay? Okay. You get 20 millirems from a chest X-ray. He got 17 sieverts all at once. Wow. I mean, it's just such a mind-boggling amount of radiation that I can't believe he didn't die immediately. I say we take a break and come back and talk about Ochi's agonizing 83 days of life that followed that radiation exposure. All right.

6:49Josh Clark:We'll be right back.

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7:20Josh Clark:Yeah, well, you know, of course, the mid-80s to mid-90s would probably be the greatest era of skateboarding. Like, I know that's our era, but even skate historians say so.

7:28Chuck Bryant:Yeah, well, the 80s are when Mike McGill invented the McTwist. Check this out. 720 degrees midair on a half pipe. Oh, my God. Amazing. How does someone even do that? I don't know, man. It's just crazy. And that's where it came from, the mid-80s, thanks to Bones Brigade member Mike McGill. Plus also, the 80s were the era of Nautus Kapus, who's one of the most amazing street skaters ever. Check out this video of him rail sliding on the roll bar of a pickup truck. That looks like a video game. It does. It's pretty amazing. I could watch skate videos all day, Chuck.

8:02Josh Clark:Yeah, me too.

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8:16Josh Clark:Yeah, and with background play, it lets us keep listening with our screen locked, which is great if we're doing something else, which we always are, but you still want to hear the video content. And get this, with offline downloads, we can save videos ahead of time and watch them anywhere, even without Wi-Fi.

8:29Chuck Bryant:So back to that debate. If you go to the search bar of YouTube Premium and search for golden era of skateboarding, You can see that there's a bunch of different videos that come up, and they're from a bunch of different eras. There's like people skating in old pools in the 70s. There's, of course, the 80s, which were amazing to us. But there's still tons of people skating today that are amazing, like this guy Antoine Dixon. He was still doing amazing stuff this year in 2026. Check out this little video of him. He's amazing, and he's skating right now.

9:00Josh Clark:Yeah, you know, so after reviewing the evidence, we may finally have our answer. or maybe we've just uncovered more skateboarding debates we need to settle. But either way, that's the beauty of YouTube Premium. It's a more supercharged, enhanced way to enjoy everything you already love about YouTube. So if you like YouTube, you'll love Premium. Sign up now for your free trial. Terms and conditions apply.

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10:42Chuck Bryant:So, Chuck, before we broke, I was saying I was surprised that he didn't die immediately. Yeah. The reason he didn't die immediately was because it takes a little while for the incredible damage that the radiation did to his body to actually take effect. But what it did essentially was it blasted through every cell in Hisashi Ouchi's body and damaged the DNA inside so much so that the doctors caring for him said that he had completely or the radiation had completely shattered his chromosomes. The actual packets that hold the DNA in your cells were just shattered. They couldn't find chromosomal structures throughout his body that weren't just totally messed up.

11:31Josh Clark:Yeah. We should mention there were three guys in the immediate area. He was the one closest to the tank. There was another guy a little less close to the tank. And then I guess the third guy even less close to the tank. Ouchi was taken to a local hospital at first, obviously, like very quickly, and then transferred to the National Institute of Radiological Sciences in Chiba, but then eventually would end up at the University of Tokyo Hospital for some really extensive specialized treatment. Specialized meaning like they had no roadmap for this, so they were kind of trying anything. Exactly.

12:07Chuck Bryant:They got in touch with his sister who was like, hey, he is not really able to produce new white blood cells. Basically, any fast-growing, fast-regenerating cell, it took the damage the most. And that's where it showed up first because those are the cells that are dividing. And now that their DNA is messed up, they're dividing in all sorts of terrible ways. So the things that made up like the lining to his gut, those fast dividing cells, they started to show problems first. His skin and then his bone marrow that produces white blood cells, red blood cells, all sorts of really important stuff. That was probably the biggest problem because he was very vulnerable to infection without a bunch of white blood cells or not producing correct ones anymore.

12:54Chuck Bryant:So they went to his sister and said, hey, can you donate some bone marrow? and she did.

13:00Josh Clark:Yeah. So, you know, like I said, they were trying blood transfusions at first, stem cell transplants, and that's where his sister came into play. And initially, it showed like that transplant produced some new white blood cells, but very quickly, they started getting damaged and, you know, basically in the same way. He was just so riddled with it. And his skin and his intestinal lining couldn't regenerate normally. He had to constantly get fluids, like, replaced all throughout his body. He was on respiratory support. And, like, organ failure started to set in.

13:40Chuck Bryant:Yeah. So, the guy who was second closest when that radiation blast went off, his name was Masato Shinohara. And he died from his injuries in 2000, April 2000. But about four months before, on December 21st, 1999, Hisachi Ochi died at the University of Tokyo Hospital. And it had been 83 days since he had undergone that blast of radiation. And so, of course, this made really big news around Japan and around the world. Like, this is nuts that anybody even lasted that long, let alone just the grisliness of the whole thing. So, everybody was like, how did this happen at all. And they started looking at JCO.