TEPCO relies on destitute alcoholics to clean up Fukushima; workers bathed in radioactive waste

TEPCO relies on destitute alcoholics to clean up Fukushima; workers bathed in radioactive waste:

(NaturalNews) Officials with the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) have shifted attention away from the energy producer's crippled Fukushima nuclear plant in recent months, leaving a poorly trained, often unskilled and demoralized workforce to take care of the dangerous radiological cleanup there, multiple reports say.

Meanwhile, as reported by The New York Times, TEPCO continues to pour a wealth of resources into Kashiwazaki-Kariwa, another plant that the company hopes to restart later in 2014 as part of the government's plan to begin using nuclear-generated power again some three years after the world's second-worst nuclear disaster - a move that some on the country's nuclear regulatory board have criticized.

The shift in focus, the paper noted, has resulted in lower-paying jobs at Fukushima that are much more sporadic, which has resulted in a flight of qualified workers. In their wake, according to laborers and others at the crippled plant, "is a work force often assembled by fly-by-night labor brokers with little technical or safety expertise and even less concern about hiring desperate people," the Times reported, adding that police have said some of the most dubious labor brokers even have ties to organized crime.