The Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station (FDNPS), operated by Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings, Inc., went into meltdown in the aftermath of a large tsunami caused by the Great East Japan Earthquake of 11 March 2011. Measurement of radiation distribution inside the FDNPS buildings is indispensable to execute decommissioning tasks in the reactor buildings. We conducted a radiation imaging experiment inside the reactor building of Unit 1 of FDNPS by using a compact Compton camera mounted on a crawler robot and remotely visualized gamma-rays streaming from deep inside the reactor building. Moreover, we drew a radiation image obtained using the Compton camera onto the three-dimensional (3-D) structural model of the experimental environment created using photogrammetry. In addition, the 3-D model of the real working environment, including the radiation image, was imported into the virtual space of the virtual reality system. These visualization techniques help workers recognize radioactive contamination easily and decrease their own exposure to radiation because the contamination cannot be observed with the naked eye.

No abstract

We measured alpha emitters obtained from a reactor building in the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant (FDNPP) by using an alpha particle imaging detector. For developing the detector, we used a very thin (0.05-mm-thick) a cerium-doped Gd3(Ga,Al)5O12 (Ce:GAGG) scintillator and silicon photomultiplier (SiPM) arrays as the photodetector. The floor of the reactor building in FDNPP was wiped off by using smear papers, and the radioactivity of these papers was measured by the alpha particle imaging detector. In addition, we measured a Plutonium (Pu) sample (mainly 5.5 MeV alpha particles from 238Pu) obtained from a nuclear fuel facility by using of the same detector for comparison with the smear papers. The alpha spectrum was in the energy range of 5–6 MeV, which corresponds to the alpha particle energy of 238Pu (5.5 MeV). The correlation coefficient of the alpha spectra of the smear papers and the Pu sample had a strong positive linear relation. Moreover, the peak of 241Am was identified by gamma spectrum measurement. Based on these results, we report actual findings of alpha emitters in the FDNPP reactor buildings originating from nuclear fuels. The surface contamination level of alpha emitters exceeded 4 Bq/cm2.