Haruo Miyadera is spearheading a project to use subatomic particles called muons to peer into the damaged reactors at the Fukushima No. 1 power plant.

"Finding out what is happening inside the reactors will be the first step toward dismantling them," said the 36-year-old physicist at Toshiba Corp.'s Power and Industrial Systems Research and Development Center.

Tokyo Electric Power Co., which runs the power plant, wants to start removing the reactors' melted fuel cores in 2020. It plans to install muon detection equipment next year that will help them examine the reactors' interiors, which are too radioactive to probe by direct means.