The nuclear emergency at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant comes 4 years after another quake delivered an admonition to Tokyo Electric Power Company that seismic perils at its atomic reactors could be far bigger than nuclear plant engineers had visualized.
TEPCO is now battling to prevent a disastrous meltdown at 3 of the 6 reactors at the Fukushima nuclear power plant, with a second hydrogen blast early Monday morning indicating the difficulty of that effort. But in 2007, the firm escaped such danger at its Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear plant, the biggest nuclear power station in the globe, when it was smashed by a 6.8-magnitude quake that was up to three times bigger than the plant’s structure was built to withstand.
That underrate touched off worry and study throughout the worldwide nuclear industry, but officials have pointed to the event as a manifestation of nuclear plant flexibility, because no serious safety systems or structures were impaired. Industry reviewers have drawn a less soothing conclusion: “They were lucky,” says Arjun Makhijani, an engineer and president of the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for Energy and Environmental Research. In any case, there is no issue that TEPCO’s seismic risk evaluations now will be under renewed scrutiny.
