The following article by Aileen Mioko Smith and
C. Douglas Lummis appeared in the March 13, 1995
issue of "The Nation". While reading this article,
it is important to realize that every nuclear power
reactor in the United States is built on, or near,
an earthquake fault."ON SHAKY GROUND"
WILL JAPAN'S NUKE PLANTS BE NEXT?
Dateline Tokyo
Legend has it that there is a giant catfish buried deep in the sand beneath the Japanese islands who occasionally shifts and changes positions. When that happens the earth shakes and splits, rocks roll down from the mountain tops and the fragile constructions of human beings collapse. People used to say that the ever present danger of earthquakes here contributed to the Japanese sense of ephemerality of all things.
Who would have thought they would build forty-eight [now fifty-two] nuclear power plants on the back of the catfish?
Naturally, people worry about this. In the visitor's center at the Mihama Nuclear Power Complex there is an earthquake safety demonstration display. Viewers stand in front of a mock reactor and a narrator's voice says, "See, the reactor can be safely stopped."
As it happens, running directly beneath this Visitor's Center is an earthquake fault. Far from believing in the ephemerality of their constructions, power company scientists and engineers in Japan seem to believe that science and technology, properly employed, can overcome unpredictability and eliminate the danger of an "accident" from the world. This is a superstition common to scientists everywhere. Without it, no one in his right mind would build a nuclear power plant.
When the nuclear plant at Chernobyl blew up, Japan's nuclear engineers went on TV to assure the public it can't happen here. The Chernobyl plant was badly built; Japanese plants are of a different type, and have superior safety features. There will not be an accident.
And when the killer earthquake hit San Francisco on 1989, and ferro-concrete buildings, elevated highways and a piece of the Bay Bridge came down, engineers here went on TV and said much the same thing. The buildings and highways that collapsed were not built to be earthquake proof, they explained. In Japan, where earthquakes are well understood, all large constructions are built to withstand any earthquake that might predictably occur.
In the great Kobe earthquake of January 17, 1995, every kind of construction went down -- concrete buildings disintegrated, steel buildings looked like squashed tin cans, the subway became a mine disaster and 550 yards of the Hanshin Super highway toppled over to one side, it's massive posts reduced to gravel.
Now the experts are back on TV again, explaining. The construction was earthquake proof, they say, meaning it was built to withstand any earthquake that might PREDICTABLY come to Kobe. This earthquake was beyond prediction. It was bigger than anyone thought possible, and also different. It occurred on a number of different faults, some of which had not even been know to exist. It jiggled in an unusual way, producing strange effects, such as the collapse of only one of the middle floors of high-rise buildings.
It was a tremendous accident of nature. Accidents can happen. The city of Kobe lies next to the southwest corner of what is called the Kinki Triangle, an area where an extraordinarily large number of earthquake faults form a roughly triangular shape. The southeast corner of the triangle is under Ise Bay, and the tip is under Tsuruga Peninsula. Tsuruga is at the eastern edge of Japan's notorious Genpatsu Ginza -- eighty eight miles of coastline dotted with fifteen nuclear power plants. The peninsula itself is the site of the prototype fast breeder reactor Monju, three pressurized water reactors, two boiling water reactors plus a unique Japanese reactor called Fugen, which like Monju, uses plutonium (the earth's most toxic substance) as a fuel. Any one of the commercial reactors on the Genpatsu Ginza contains, at the time of refueling, 1,000 times the radiation generated by the Hiroshima bomb. Monju, on the other hand, contains 1.4 TONS of plutonium. If an "unpredictable" Kobe scale earthquake hit Tsuruga, Koreans would wonder at the green sun rising to their east at the wrong time.
Could such an accident happen?
There is an earthquake fault that runs a third of a mile east of the Mihama Complex (the one under the visitor's center), passing about half-mile west of Monju. Government officials insist that this fault is "inactive." Other experts point out that "inactive" simply means that there has been no earthquake for a long time. It is utterly unscientific to say that this guarantees that there will be no earthquake on that fault in the future. As mentioned above, the Kobe earthquake occurred partly on faults that the experts didn't even know were there.
In any case, the "earthquake-proof" power plants were built on the basis of calculations that excluded the possibility of of an earthquake on this fault. Other faults also run in the area. Calculations that include the possibility of an earthquake on a combination of these faults indicate an earthquake with twenty times the force of the maximum predicted by the governments experts.
What would happen then? One official complained, "That's like asking what would happen
if the world blew up!"There is a strong, but by no means strong enough, anti-nuclear power movement in Japan. On the whole it has been weakened by excessive trust in scientists and government officials.: "They must know what they are doing" is the usual refrain. The Kobe catastrophe has made it clear that they do not. There is no question that nuclear power generation is absurd on these shifting islands and will be abolished some day. The only question is whether that day will come in time."
Mothers' Alert Home | More Information | Actions | News | Email