As if that prospect weren’t bad enough, and as the dangers they face seem to get worse by the day, the basic conditions in which they’re living and working are also inexcusably bad – a high-stakes mirror of the larger state of affairs endured by hundreds of thousands of homeless and refugees in Japan’s triple disaster.

On Tuesday, Kazuma Yokota, a safety inspector at the plant, provided some information to CNN about the conditions of the 400 workers living in a building a little over a half-mile away from Daiichi. Sleeping with one blanket and a leaded mat intended to protect them from radiation, the employees work in 12-hour shifts on three-day rotations. They eat twice a day – a breakfast of vegetable juice and 30 crackers, and a pre-prepared meal for dinner. With few deliveries coming in, water — like food — is scarce. Yokota told CNN that Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) plans on improving conditions, but it’s hard to imagine how the rights of these workers will be prioritized on Tepco’s growing list of the things going very, very wrong…

For now, Tepco’s alternatives to continuing to expose workers to radiation are few. The power company could resort to using “jumpers,” which Reuters describes as “people who rush into a highly radioactive area, do one job, and then jump out within minutes. Some in the industry even refer to them as ‘gamma sponges’ or ‘glow boys’ because they can absorb a year’s worth of radiation in those few minutes.” In an arguably stranger twist, both Germany and the U.S. have also offered to lend Japan radiation-proof robots to take some of the burden off the flesh-and-blood workforce.