Despite an 11-year-long clean-up operation at the site in Japan, the mixture of nuclear fuel and debris inside the three damaged reactors remains in place and is currently too dangerous to be dealt with.
To tackle this, a University of Sheffield team has worked with the Japanese authorities to develop a material that simulates the highly radioactive mixture at the centre of the plant. They hope this will help crack the method for the ultimate disposal of the ultra-dangerous debris.
South Yorkshire residents will be reassured that there is no similarly dangerous stock of simulated debris sitting in a laboratory somewhere in Sheffield as the project has involved replacing the most dangerous elements, including plutonium, with non-radioactive substitutes which replicate their properties.
“Being able to understand something about the material inside is crucial to developing the retrieval strategy,” said project lead Professor Claire Corkhill. “Until that...