Fault Under Japan Nuclear Plant May be Active

November 11th, 2012

Via: AFP:

Japan’s only working nuclear power plant sits on what may be a seismic fault in the earth’s crust, a geologist has warned, saying it is “very silly” to allow it to continue operating.

Mitsuhisa Watanabe says the earth’s plates could move underneath the Oi nuclear plant in western Japan, causing a catastrophe to rival last year’s atomic disaster at Fukushima – although some of his colleagues on a nuclear advisory panel disagree.

“It is an active fault. The plates shifted some 120,000 to 130,000 years ago for sure,” Watanabe, of Tokyo’s Toyo University, told AFP.

“In research that I have conducted on active faults in Japan and overseas, structures built above them were all damaged” when they moved and caused an earthquake, he said.

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.