nuclear-news

In Earthquake Zone, Jaitapur Nuclear Plant Could Be Courting Calamity  Huffington Poast Bharat Karnad 18/05/2015  “.A nuclear power plant is a controlled atom bomb. But it can blow because of a natural disaster, design fault or errors in operating it. An earthquake, by unsettling its foundations, can lead reactors to malfunction, to uncontrolled fission, release of immense heat, a meltdown of the reactor core, and the spread of lethal radioactivity ending, perhaps, in less physical destruction but in dangerous radiation poisoning of the surrounding air, land and water bodies.

Nothing can be done to prevent earthquakes, considering that the Indian subcontinent is on a moving tectonic plate that is constantly crashing into the Himalayan range and pushing under the Eurasian plate at the rate of 5cm per year. Some areas are thus seriously earthquake-prone owing to aggravated faultlines and fissures in the earth.

Mixing earthquakes and nuclear power plants, therefore, would seem like courting a nightmare, which is what Jaitapur may be facing. This town, located on the unspoilt Ratnagiri coast of Maharashtra, is at the confluence of seismic zones 3 and 4, the latter the penultimate category in the national system for assessing earthquake-sensitive areas and identified as a “High Damage Risk Zone”. It is also the site prospectively for the largest nuclear power complex in the world, expected to pump 9,900 MW of electricity into the national grid………http://www.huffingtonpost.in/bharat-karnad-/post_9370_b_7303336.html