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THE world's biggest nuclear power station stands directly above an active earthquake faultline, which provoked an atomic spill this week, seismologists revealed yesterday.
The disclosure that the Kashiwazaki plant was prone to further earthquake damage threw Japan's nuclear industry into crisis as seismologists recommended that up to one-third of the country's 55 atomic power stations be closed for inspection.
In addition to the seismic threat to the Kashiwazaki plant, scientists identified an active threat to one of Japan's oldest nuclear power stations and demanded that it should be closed immediately.
Serious
The former head of the country's top authority on earthquake prediction said that the Shizuoka plant posed a serious safety risk and that atomic experts were calling for it to be shut down.
http://www.independent.ie/world-news/asia/nuclear-leak-plant-was-built-over-active-fault-zone-1039809.htmlNuclear crisis in Japan as scientists reveal quake threat to power plants
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The precarious state of the Kashiwazaki plant was underscored by an earthquake on Monday that knocked over hundreds of drums of nuclear waste, many of which split open during the tremors. The town’s mayor ordered all activity at the power station to be suspended indefinitely. It was shut down temporarily during the quake.
The suspension, and the threat of widespread disruption to nuclear plants around the country, was likely to herald “a hot summer of blackouts” in parts of central Japan, according to energy analysts. The power shortages would affect factories and businesses across the region. Japan, which has almost no oil or gas reserves, generates 33 per cent of its electricity in nuclear power stations, but the Government hopes to increase this to 40 per cent by 2010.
The revelations of Kashiwazaki’s geological weakness dealt a massive blow to the credibility of the Tokyo High Court and to the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology — the government- affiliated body whose survey showed the fault to be about 15km (nine miles) from the plant.
In 2005, fearing the effects of a large quake, a group of residents fought to have Kashiwazaki’s license to build a new reactor revoked. The Tokyo High Court rejected the plaintiffs’ claim that an active fault ran under the station, concluding that what the residents thought was an active fault “did not even amount to a fault and could not cause a quake”. Atomic experts said yesterday that the discovery may dramatically challenge the safety of the entire atomic energy supply in Japan and that as many as a third of the country’s 55 nuclear power stations might have to be suspended until they were made sufficiently quake-proof to be restarted. More...
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article2096238.ece Zwentendorf, a Nuclear Plant That Will Never Be Turned on
On the bank of the Danube 20 miles northwest of Vienna stands a completed nuclear power plant, loaded with fuel, ready to start up. It has stood there, just so, for 9 years, while the Austrians argue about what to do with it. The most popular plan is to turn it into a museum for obsolete technology.
The plant, called Zwentendorf, was intended to be the first of six Austrian nuclear plants. It was begun in 1970 and completed in 1978 at a cost of 8 billion Austrian schillings -- at present value about a billion dollars. It is rated at 700 megawatts, about two-thirds the size of Seabrook and Shoreham, two American nuclear plants that are also ready to go and hotly contested.
"When Zwentendorf began, we didn't know anything," an Austrian environmentalist told me. "Nuclear power sounded better to us than a coal plant or another hydropower dam on the Danube. If only we had known then what we know now."
They know now that two of the four German plants with the same design as Zwentendorf have been shut down permanently by mechanical problems. They know now that Zwentendorf is located squarely on an earthquake fault zone. And during a Danube flood, water seeped into its containment vessel, so now they know that the groundwater is not protected from contamination in case of a meltdown.
http://www.sustainer.org/dhm_archive/index.php?display_article=vn166zwentedAnd then there are the guys with the box cutters...
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