JCO criticality accident termination operation

In 2001, we summarized the circumstances surrounding termination of the JCO criticality accident based on testimony in the Mito District Court on December 17, 2001. JCO was the company for uranium fuels production in Japan. That document was assembled based on actual testimony in the belief that a description of the work involved in termination of the accident would be useful in some way for preventing nuclear disasters in the future. The description focuses on the witness' own behavior, and what he saw and heard, and thus is written from the perspective of action by one individual. This was done simply because it was easier for the witness to write down his memories as he remembers them. Description of the activities of other organizations and people is provided only as necessary, to ensure that consistency in the descriptive approach is not lost. The essentials of this report were rewritten as a third-person objective description in the summary of the report by the Atomic Energy Society of Japan (AESJ). Since then, comments have been received from sources such as former members of the Nuclear Safety Commission (Dr. Kenji Sumita and Dr. Akira Kanagawa), concerned parties from the former Science and Technology Agency, and reports from the JCO Criticality Accident Investigation Committee of the AESJ, and thus this report was rewritten to correct incorrect information, and add material where that was felt to be necessary. This year is the tenth year of the JCO criticality accident. To mark this occasion we have decided to translate the record of what occurred at the accident site into English so that more people can draw lessons from this accident. This report is an English version of JAEA-Technology 2009-073. (author)