Bad Timing: Japan Opens First Nuclear Plant Since Fukushima As Neighboring Volcano Erupts
In case last week’s deadly chemical explosion in the Chinese port of Tianjin wasn’t enough to satisfy your thirst for black swan-ish disasters that could serve to accelerate the ongoing global currency wars, Japan is now warning that Sakurajima, one of the country’s most active volcanos may be set to erupt.
As Reuters notes, Sakurajima erupts “almost constantly,” but based on the mountain’s “increased activity,” experts say this eruption could be “larger than usual.”
The Japan Meteorological Agency has raised the warning level from 3 to 4 and because these arbitrarily assigned numbers are largely meaningless to the anyone who doesn’t track volcanic activity, the agency is kind enough to provide a description for each level: 4 means “prepare to evacuate.”
“The possibility for a large-scale eruption has become extremely high for Sakurajima,” the Agency warned on Saturday. As for what fate would befall someone who failed to heed an evacuation warning, well let’s just say that molten stones “could rain down on areas near the mountain’s base.”
But the real problem is Sakurajima’s location – it’s just 50 kilometers from the Sendai nuclear power plant.
As fate would have it, last Tuesday Sendai became the first nuclear reactor to be restarted in Japan since the Chernobyl redux at Fukushima in 2011.
Critics, Reuters adds, have warned that “the plant is also located near five giant crater-like depressions formed by past eruptions, with the closest one some 40 km away” and as The Guardian points out, some experts claim “the restarted reactor at Sendai [is] still at risk from natural disasters,” despite the fact that it was the first nuclear plant to pass new regulations put in place by the country’s Nuclear Regulation Authority on the heels of the disaster in 2011.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
