'Silly' to run Japanese nuclear plant on fault line - From: AFP
- November 11, 2012 JAPAN'S only working nuclear power plant
sits on what may be a seismic fault in the earth's crust, a
geologist has warned. Mitsuhisa Watanabe says the earth's plates
could move under 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," Mr Watanabe, of Tokyo's
Toyo University, said. "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. Mr Watanabe, a tectonic geomorphologist, is part of a
five-member team tasked by the Nuclear Regulation Authority with
looking into the tectonic situation underneath the plant, which
houses the country's only working reactors. Under government
guidelines atomic insta