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Nuclear plant not designed to stand such an earthquake

Quake-rattled nuclear plant puts NRC in unprecedented spot, By Wendy Koch, USA TODAY, 9 Sept 11 As the six-month anniversary of Japan’s near meltdown of a nuclear plant looms Sunday, the commercial nuclear industry in the United States is facing its own unprecedented challenge.

For the fist time, on Aug. 23, a U.S. nuclear plant was shaken more by an earthquake than it was designed to handle. So when is it safe to restart the Virginia plant shuttered by the 5.8-magnitude quake? This is the question now bedeviling the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

At a public hearing Thursday, a senior NRC official told Dominion, the plant’s operator, that it will likely face a series of meetings and many questions before it gets the NRC’s approval to restart the North Anna Power Station in Mineral, Va…..

Executives of Richmond-based Dominion acknowledge the historic nature of the event. “This is the first time a U.S. plant has exceeded design basis,” Eugune Grecheck, vice president of nuclear development, told reporters after the three-hour public meeting at NRC’s headquarters in Rockville, Md….. http://content.usatoday.com/communities/greenhouse/post/2011/09/quake-rattled-nuclear-plant-puts-nrc-in-unprecedented-spot/1

September 10, 2011 - Posted by | safety, USA

1 Comment »

  1. There is another problem the NRC ought to start thinking about: a man-made earthquake. It could be caused by terrorists crashing a jetliner, moving at 500 miles an hour, into or even NEAR a nuclear plant. It could also be caused by someone filling a cave or a storm sewer system with the “right stuff” and causing an explosion.

    This is not an unrealistic senario. When I was 14 years old, I got so upset with school bullying and school yard violence, I decided to blow up a town. The scheme involved toilets and gasoline, and was built on my memories of flour dust explosions in grain silos in the Midwest where I grew up. You can read about it at http://scripturalphysics.org/etc/ConsumerExperiences.html#SewersideBomber . Decades later I read about a horrific gasoline blast in Guadalajara, Mexico. It registered 7.0 on the Richter scale at Mexico City, some 200 miles away! This was effectively a man-made earthquake, even though accidental. What if the North Anna plant had only been a few miles away from this kind of explosion? And what if it had been intentionally planned by ADULT terrorists with backgrounds in chemical engineering, rather than being an accident?

    Brian Fraser's avatar Comment by Brian Fraser | September 12, 2011 | Reply


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