????菅直人說，他告訴清水正孝，他們需要在東電總部設(shè)立一個核電聯(lián)合小組，以提高聯(lián)絡(luò)效率。為了彰顯對局勢的重視，清水正孝剛一走，菅直人也立即驅(qū)車前往東京電力公司總部。

????在早上5點45分左右，菅直人對包括總裁清水正孝和董事長勝俁恒久在內(nèi)的200多名東電員工做了講話，他說，他知道他們正面臨一個“艱難的時刻”。

????在全廠失電發(fā)生后的幾天里，福島第一核電站現(xiàn)場的工人們想盡一切辦法應對混亂和繼續(xù)惡化的局面。他們爬到被摧毀得面目全非的核電站停車場上收集汽車電瓶，希望用它來發(fā)電打開反應堆的閥門。

????后來政府下達了對反應堆安全殼進行泄壓的命令，以減小反應堆內(nèi)積累的壓力。工人們吞下碘化鉀藥片，然后他們被告知只有17分鐘的工作時間，以免在危險的高輻射環(huán)境下暴露太長時間。

????負責這項高危任務(wù)的是東電公司在危機現(xiàn)場的尖兵、福島第一核電站站長吉田雅夫。在危機的頭幾天，由于菅直人和東京的其他決策人員在各種信息中舉棋不定，讓吉田深感沮喪。

????吉田比任何人更明白，把水灌入反應堆和乏燃料池，是當前最需要發(fā)生的事。在危機發(fā)生已經(jīng)超過一天后，一號反應堆也在一次氫氣爆炸中嚴重受損，這時東京的決策層卻在“再臨界”問題上糾結(jié)起來，可謂不分輕重——至少在吉田看來是這樣的。

????實現(xiàn)“冷停堆”是當時的努力方向，菅直人則想知道已經(jīng)暴露的堆心是否仍在產(chǎn)生裂變反應，因而使問題復雜化了（而直到今天，福島第一核電站仍然保持著冷停堆狀態(tài)）。據(jù)日本知名記者船橋洋一領(lǐng)導的獨立調(diào)查委員會公布的細節(jié)來看，當時的討論不知怎么糾結(jié)在了是否應該向反應堆泵入海水的問題上。

????由于福島第一核電站的局勢迅速惡化，吉田雅夫認為東京的這種討論純屬浪費時間。船橋洋一的獨立調(diào)查委員會報告寫道，當時吉田雅夫與清水正孝和東電的政府首席聯(lián)絡(luò)官武黑一郎進行了電話會議，結(jié)果總部要求吉田暫緩對暴露的反應堆噴灑海水。在吉田看來，這在當時完全是個錯誤的決定。

????因此在電話會議期間，吉田向另一名員工做了個手勢，對他低聲耳語道：哪怕一會兒他下令中止向反應堆噴灑海水——好讓東京的官員們在電話里能聽見——他也想讓現(xiàn)場的所有人知道，他們應該對那個命令置之不理。因為反應堆必須要噴水降溫，否則他們就會陷入更加被動的境地。

????Kan said he then told the Shimizu that they needed to set up a joint nuclear task force at the company's headquarters, so lines of communication might be improved. Kan wanted to reinforce the message at TEPCO, and so he drove to the headquarters shortly after Shimizu had left.

????At around 5:45 that morning, he addressed some 200 TEPCO employees, including Shimizu and the chairman, Tsunehisa Katsumata, and told them that he knew they faced "a tough moment."

????In the days that followed the station blackout, many of TEPCO's on site workers went to extraordinary lengths to cope with the chaotic and deteriorating situation. They scrambled to the site's parking lots and scavenged car batteries to try to generate power to open key valves at the reactors.

????When the government gave the orders to vent the primary containment vessels of the operating reactors, an important step to diminish the pressure building up inside, workers popped potassium iodide tablets and were told they had only 17 minutes to work, lest they be exposed for too long to radiation levels that were dangerously high.

????The man at the center of this, TEPCO's point man during the crisis, was Masao Yoshida, the site manager at Fukushima Daiichi. He had also been frustrated in the firstdays of the crisis by what he felt was bad information Kan and other key people in Tokyo were getting.

????Yoshida understood better than anyone involved that getting water onto the reactors and into the spent fuel pools was the most important thing that needed to happen. But at one point, more than a day into crisis and—after a hydrogen explosion had already damaged reactor unit one—the powers that be in Tokyo got sidetracked, at least in Yoshida's view, by a discussion about "re-criticality."

????Kan wanted to know whether the exposed core could still create a fissile reaction, complicating the effort to achieve a "cold shut-down" (which to this day remains the ultimate end game at Fukushima Daiichi.) According to the detailed account of an independent investigative commission led by Yoichi Funabashi, one of Japan's most respected journalists, the discussion somehow got tangled up with the question of whether to try to pump seawater into the reactors.

????Yoshida, with the situation at the plant deteriorating rapidly, thought this discussion was a complete waste of time. He was thus stunned, according to the Funabashi Commission report, when on a conference call with Shimizu and TEPCO's chief liaison with the government, Ichiro Takekuro, he was told to delay the spraying of seawater onto the exposed reactors.

????This, in Yoshida's view, was exactly the wrong thing to do at that moment.

????So during the call, Yoshida motioned another employee over and whispered to him that even though he would now order a halt to the seawater injections—so the officials in Tokyo could hear him doing so on the phone—he wanted everyone at the site to understand that they should disregard that order. Seawater needed to be sprayed onto the site—or they were going to be in worse trouble than they were already.