Japan Deploys Old People to Solve Nuclear Problem

By James Hornung

TOKYO- The nation of Japan, facing a potential nuclear meltdown after a catastrophic tsunami, has faced the difficult situation of having workers risk life and limb to repair the radioactive site. To reconcile the problematic situation, the nation’s government has begun to ask its senior citizens to take the lead in the recovery effort.

The government cited several reasons why it chose old people to help deal with the potentially disastrous reactor. Perhaps the most important reason is that they will have less to lose. The Japanese are famously efficient people, sometimes trading sentimentality for better production, so it comes as no surprise that they would see the value in risking the lives of 80 year olds rather than young people with valuable lives still ahead of them. Moreover, nuclear radiation is a leading cause of birth defects, and if those exposed to radiation are well past their child-bearing years, it naturally follows that it minimizes the risk of birth defects.

[LEFT- While these volunteers are willing to help, they have long lives ahead of them that the government would like them to continue living. Old people don't have that same problem.]

Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan explained the decision. “We were faced with a terrible situation that left us no good choices, so we had to try to find the least bad alternative. Sending our old people into a radioactive nuclear power plant is certainly not optimal. I’m sure that some of our nation’s finest soup recipes and fishing stories will never come out of those reactors, but the job has to be done. On the positive side, killing off many of our old people will save the young from many unpleasant trips to nursing homes. Also, there’s no scientific basis for this, but I have been thinking that if they melt on the spot like the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, we won’t need to bury their remains, which will save some space in our already crowded country.”

Mr. Kan was also asked how the country arrived at the age of 65 as the cutoff for who would be asked to enter the nuclear reactor. He responded, “because I’m 64 and this should be over in a few months.”

It would seem as though Japan is depending heavily on old people either being extremely civic-minded or borderline suicidal. To help motivate people to volunteer for a very undesirable job, the government has developed a detailed marketing plan. As with most Japanese marketing plans, it will involve cartoon kitties telling people to go into the nuclear reactors and will remind viewers that not going into the reactor would bring great shame to the country and family. Perhaps the most brilliant part of the marketing plan is the strategy to target former kamikaze pilots from World War II. The advertisers plan to guilt trip the survivors for not completing their jobs during the war and blaming them for the eventual loss of the war. They will also tell them that they only way they can make up the great debt to their country is to perform a similar act of self-sacrifice by going into the nuclear reactor to repair the damage.

The trickiest part of the project is that nobody has any idea how to actually fix the nuclear reactor. The best solution they have come up with so far is to pour seawater on it because it looked like it was getting too hot. Nuclear physicist Yoshi Nakamura explained that

the country and its scientific community are in uncharted territory. “We’re just going to tell the old people to go in there and see if it looks like anything is broken. Hopefully, they will just sort of suck up the radiation and the power plant will stop glowing and pulsating. Every time we send someone in there, they get instantly evaporated. We are going to try sending a lot of people in together to see if the radiation targets only a few of them, and we’re going to cover them in mud so they don’t overheat as quickly. Now that I think about it, the radiation sounds

a lot like the Predator. I’m going to suggest to the panel to try to make it bleed, because it is a well established scientific principle that if it bleeds, it dies.”

[RIGHT- An artist's rendering of what the radiation may look like.]

If you are interested in applying to help fix the broken nuclear reactor, you are over 65 years of age, and you have a horrible feeling of shame that causes you to want to die, but you still want to help Japan, contact Japanese Union of Plutonium Engineers for more information.