The Next Fukushima? Active Fault Line Discovered Directly Below Japanese Nuclear Power Plant
Five years after the Fukushima disaster, things are getting worse.
As we reported last week, “the fuel rods melted through their containment vessels in the reactors, and no one knows exactly where they are now. Tepco has been developing robots, which can swim under water and negotiate obstacles in damaged tunnels and piping to search for the melted fuel rods. But as soon as they get close to the reactors, the radiation destroys their wiring and renders them useless, causing long delays, Masuda said.”
More troubling was our assessment that the “2011 disaster will be repeated. After the Fukushima nuclear meltdown, Japan was flooded with massive anti-nuclear protests which led to a four-year nationwide moratorium on nuclear plants. The moratorium was lifted, despite sweeping opposition, last August and nuclear plants are being restarted.”
And now we have the candidate for the “next Fukushima” – as Japan’s Yomiuri Shimbun reports, one of the faults that run under the premises of Hokuriku Electric Power Co.’s Shika nuclear power plant in Ishikawa Prefecture can be reasonably concluded to be active, according to an evaluation compiled last Thursday by an expert panel at the Nuclear Regulation Authority.
According to the Shimbun, the No. 1 reactor at the Shika plant may have to be decommissioned under the new nuclear regulatory standards, which ban the construction of important facilities above an active fault. The fault in question lies directly under the No. 1 reactor building.
Eight faults run under the premises of the Shika power station. Of these, three faults called S-1, S-2 and S-6 have been subject to close scrutiny. The S-1 fault lies directly under the No. 1 reactor building, a facility designated as an important facility under the new regulatory criteria.
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