US Workers Join International Team Tackling Japan's Nuclear Crisis

Who's willing to kiss their family goodbye and fly halfway around the world into a radioactive cauldron, toiling at 12-hour shifts in potentially life-threatening conditions and surviving on emergency rations, all in the hopes of saving Japan from nuclear disaster?

More people than you might think.

Nuclear workers from the United States, France and other countries are heading to Japan to take part in the frantic operation to stop more radiation from spewing out of the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant. Three weeks after a 9.0-magnitude quake destabilized the plant and sent a tsunami rushing through it, some 400 Japanese nuclear workers are living and working at the facility, and an unknown number of foreigners are joining them.

There's even an American recruiting firm taking applications from people who want to go.

"About two weeks ago, we told our managers to put together a wish list of anyone interested in going to Japan," Joe Melanson, a recruiter at Bartlett Nuclear, a Massachusetts staffing firm that specializes in nuclear industry jobs, told Reuters. The first batch of American workers are setting off for Japan on Sunday, he said.

Besides having nuclear experience on your resume, "the only requirement was that you have a valid passport," Melanson said.

The gig also earns big pay, though the exact salary for a monthlong trip to Japan hasn't been made public.

And the workers' assignments once they land in Japan are largely unknown. Officials from the Tokyo Electric Power Co., which runs the Fukushima plant, are commanding the relief efforts, and foreign workers will go in under their ultimate command. Jobs include water purification experts, radiation monitors and spent-fuel specialists.

Tsunami Relief: Network for Good

While American nuke workers depart for Japan this weekend, their French counterparts are already on the ground there. The French nuclear giant Areva sent five experts to Japan earlier this week, after a direct request from Tepco.

"The five experts are specialized in water decontamination," Areva spokesman Jacques-Emmanuel Saulnier told AOL News in an email interview today. In recent days, ever-higher measurements of radiation have been discovered in air, seawater and groundwater near the stricken Fukushima plant. Japanese regulators ordered a review of the measurements today, saying they seem suspiciously high.

Last week, two Tepco workers were hospitalized after their feet accidentally came in contact with radioactive water inside the Fukushima plant as they were trying to lay new electricity cables there. They were treated and survived, though the long-term effects of that exposure remain unknown.

Areva also chartered two aircraft on March 18 and 22 to ferry loads of nuclear equipment to Fukushima, including 40,000 pairs of gloves, 11,000 protective suits and 3,000 masks, as well as sophisticated equipment to measure radioactivity levels, Saulnier said.

American companies have also sent equipment, including two gigantic concrete pumps that will be used to douse Fukushima's overheated reactors with water, and specialized robots normally used by U.S. military bomb-disposal units in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"We believe it could have some value to the relief efforts following the quake and the tsunami," Tim Trainer, vice president of iRobot, a Massachusetts robotics company, told AOL News. His company sent four sophisticated, remote-controlled robots to Fukushima earlier this month to help perform tasks in radioactive nooks where it's too dangerous for humans to go.

"Certainly, radiation will have some impact on the circuits. ... Some of this will be understanding what it might be like to operate in such conditions," Trainer said. "To be quite honest with you, some of this will be experimentation."

In the 1970s and early '80s, one of the most dangerous nuclear jobs was that of "jumpers" -- an industry term for people who deploy to a highly radioactive area for a short amount of time, quickly perform a repair and then jump back out before they're contaminated by dangerous materials. Now equipment like that from iRobot is used in the most radioactive areas.

But nuclear expert Rock Nelson, a staffing manager at Nelson Nuclear Corp. in Richland, Wash., said he thinks Tepco might not be able to rely solely on robots in the most dangerous situations and may need to call on human volunteers

"Each specific problem may require the engineering of a specific piece of machinery," he told Reuters. "They will almost certainly have to send a jumper or two in, but only as a last resort."