Harvey Wasserman, Buzzflash, July 19, 2007
The massive earthquake that shook Japan this week nearly killed millions in a nuclear apocalypse.
It also produced one of the most terrifying sentences ever buried in a newspaper. As reported deep in The New York Times, the Tokyo Electric Company admitted that “the force of the shaking caused by the earthquake had exceeded the design limits of the reactors, suggesting that the plant’s builders had underestimated the strength of possible earthquakes in the region.”
There are 55 reactors in Japan. Virtually all of them are on or near major earthquake faults. Kashiwazaki alone hosts seven, four of which were forced into the dangerous SCRAM mode to narrowly avoid meltdowns. At least 50 separate serious problems have been so far identified, including fire and the spillage of barrels filled with radioactive wastes.
There are four active reactors in California on or near major earthquake faults, as are the two at Indian Point north of New York City. On January 31, 1986, an earthquake struck the Perry reactor east of Cleveland, knocking out roads, bridges, and pipes within the plant, which (thankfully) was not operating at the time. Then Ohio governor Richard Celeste sued to keep Perry shut, but lost in federal court.
The fault that hit Perry is an off-shoot of the powerful New Madrid line that runs through the Mississippi River Valley, threatening numerous reactors. The Beyond Nuclear Project reports that in August 2004, a quake hit the Dresden reactor in Illinois, resulting in a leak of radioactive tritium. Nevada’s Yucca Mountain, slated as the nation’s high-level radioactive waste dump, has a visible fault line running through it.
More than 400 atomic reactors are online worldwide. We can only shudder to guess how many are vulnerable to seismic shocks. But one-eighth of them sit in one of the world’s richest, most technologically advanced, most densely populated industrial nations, which has now admitted its reactor designs cannot match the power of an earthquake that just happened.
No matter the language, this translates into the unmistakable warning that the world’s atomic reactors constitute a multiple, ticking seismic time bomb. Talk of building more can only be classified as suicidal irresponsibility.