To help farmers like him, a team of scientists has been working to speed up development of a new salt-tolerant rice variety, with the aim of making it commercially available in a few years. The project involves heavy ion beam technology developed by the prestigious independent research organization Riken.

Working on the project with Riken are researchers at Miyagi Prefecture’s Furukawa Agricultural Experiment Station in Osaki City and Tohoku University in Sendai, the chief city in the prefecture.

“We’ve had success in developing one variety of salt-resistant rice, although this variety doesn’t taste that great,” said Tomoko Abe, research group director of accelerator applications at Riken’s Nishina Center in Wako city, north of Tokyo, last month.

Salt damage can cut the yield of a rice crop in half. “With the rice variety we’re developing we should see the yield only drop by 20 percent,” Ms. Abe said. “We should also see less fragmented rice.”

Mainly used in nuclear physics and also in medical applications like cancer treatment, heavy ion beam technology was first applied by Riken to speed up mutations in plants in 1989. Ms. Abe helped to develop the world’s first salt-tolerant rice variety, based on the Nipponbare rice strain, in 2006.

For the current project, based on that research, grains of two popular rice varieties, Hitomebore and Manamusume, have been exposed to heavy ion beams generated by a particle accelerator. There are only six ion beam accelerator facilities for plant breeding in the world, and four of them are in Japan — the others being in China and Italy. Japan is the global leader in the field.

Compared to more traditional types of plant mutation techniques, using x-rays or gamma rays, plants need to be exposed to only a low dosage of powerful heavy ion beams for a short time — seconds and minutes instead of hours, days or weeks — for a high likelihood of mutation to occur. The survival rate of the exposed plants is high, moreover, because the highly focused beam does less damage to their overall DNA.