“The working time would be less than an hour, so in fact it was 200,000 yen an hour, but the risk was too big.”

Ryuta Fujita, a 27-year-old worker also from Iwaki, said he was offered twice that amount as hazard duty pay to venture into Fukushima Dai-ichi’s Reactor 2…

“I hear that guys older than 50 are being hired at high pay,” Fujita told the Tokyo Shimbun newspaper. “But I’m still young, and radiation scares me. I don’t want to work in a nuclear plant again.”

The reluctance of workers to enter the stricken plant highlights one of TEPCO’s basic dilemmas — it can’t get people close enough to see if its efforts to cool fuel rods are working; indeed, to confirm what the exact problems are in the first place.