A Collaborative Database to Support the Ongoing Fukushima Daiichi NPP Decommissioning

The accident at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant (FDNPP) in March 2011 represents one of the worst radioactive release events to have ever occurred. In the aftermath of the event approximately 160,000 people were evacuated from their homes - many of whom are still to return due to the high levels of radiation that surround the plant. While eight years have now passed since the multi-reactor incident, there still exists a considerable gap in the connected knowledge of not only where the radioactive particulate released during the accident exists and the state/form of such material, but also the state of the multiple damaged reactor cores and the resulting decommissioning challenges associated with the eventual fuel debris retrievals.

Since the accident, and release of material from three of the site's nuclear reactors, there have been numerous studies on the microscopic material recovered from aerosol samplers, plant surfaces, bulk sediments and even articles of clothing. Such studies on the particulate extracted from these samples have provided stochastic insight into the nature/cause of the accident, its environmental legacy and more-importantly the conditions that will be faced during the soon to commence clean-up activities.

The outcome of this project seeks to consolidate the multinational fragmented knowledge on this harmful, radioactive and chemotoxic contamination (most of which is easily inhalable being of micron-scale) to produce a cross-institutional platform (supported by the IAEA, Sellafield Ltd, JAEA and numerous international research organisations) on which information pertaining to the particulates location can be combined with experimentally-derived information (e.g. structure, form, composition). Such a collaborative platform would; (i) accelerate the understanding of the environmental hazards associated with this invisible material, and most-importantly over the next decade, (ii) provide the required physical data to support in-situ (reactor) measurements made using systems such as the University of Bristol "Rad Hard" Diamond Detection system.