Colophon

The cover is designed to envisage a hopeful future shining in the sky, which is a clear blue resembling the color of the JAEA logo. This is accompanied by white hexagons similar to the pattern in a tortoise shell, an ancient Japanese symbol of people’s wish for longer lives. Coincidentally, this shape is the same as that of core fuel assemblies for both the prototype fast breeder reactor “MONJU” and the high-temperature engineering test reactor “HTTR”.

The images on the cover show the dose rate distribution map around the Tokyo Electric Power Company, Incorporated (TEPCO) Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station (NPS), which was traced out using an unmanned helicopter (top left), and atomic-scale cesium absorption on a type of zeolite called mordenite (bottom right).

The former shows the results of the dose rate at 1 m above the ground, which were converted from monitoring data obtained by a flight at 80 m above the ground around the TEPCO’s Fukushima Daiichi NPS (from 3 km to 5 km from 1F) by a radiation monitoring system using an unmanned helicopter. The dose rate was normalized to that on March 21, 2013, which was the last day of measurement (Topic 1-3, p.14).

The latter shows that mordenite, a type of zeolite, is effective for cesium decontamination. We numerically simulated cesium absorption on mordenite at the atomic scale (Topic 1-19, p.30).