BEING in Japan when the Fukushima disaster struck is an experience Sellafield Ltd's Alex Walsh will never forget.

Mr Walsh – head of the company's Risley offices – was in Japan on a fact-finding trip for the Nuclear Industry Association (NIA) at the time in March 2011.

But even he had reason to question the future of nuclear power six years ago as he sat in a shaken and battered Tokyo, having watched another near catastrophe unfold elsewhere in the country.

He said: "Things were looking really good for the nuclear industry at the time.

"We'd seen people start to come around to the idea that maybe nuclear power wasn't so bad after all.

"We knew that in Japan they were building boiling water reactors in four years, when everywhere else it was taking at least six, and we wanted to understand how they were doing this and whether we could use their contractors in the UK to achieve similar levels of growth.

"There had been tremors all week – the Japanese are used to them.

"But when the big one struck I was in a shop and everything started to fall off the shelves.

"We ran outside and I saw an orb on a shrine that had stood for 600 years collapse in front of me."

The resulting tsunami eventually hit the coast home to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear facility, causing three nuclear meltdowns.

Mr Walsh added: "I watched the footage from Fukushima quite horrified – I was in touch with people who knew what the potential results of such a reactor being destroyed could have been.

"Afterwards, I remember sitting in a park in Tokyo, with Lord O'Neill, the then-boss of the NIA, talking about the future of the nuclear industry.

"In the end, the UK reacted in the best way possible, offering advice on regulation going forward.

"The Japanese looked at the work we do to regulate and endorse our reactors and held the UK system up as the best in the world.

"It could so easily have been the end of the nuclear industry but instead it was an opportunity.

"The Japanese are still looking to centres of excellence, like Sellafield, for help and advice."

Warrington is home to more than 1,000 Sellafield staff and hundreds more contractors and supply chain employees, who are engaged on work to clean up the west Cumbrian site.

The town is where the bulk of the company's design engineers and project leaders are based.

Up to 18,500 people are thought to have died due to the earthquake and tsunami but there were no fatalities due to over-exposure to radiation at Fukushima, despite initial fears.

Mr Walsh believes Warrington's status as a 'hub of nuclear innovation' will continue to 'grow and have international significance for decades to come' as plants will eventually require being 'safely decommissioned and dismantled'.