Engineers Knew Fukushima Might Be Unsafe, But Covered It Up …
And Now the Extreme Vulnerabilty of NEW U.S. Plants Is Being Covered Up
by Washington’s Blog
Global Research
November 12, 2011
Preface: The current nuclear reactor design was chosen – not because it was safe – but because it worked on navy submarines. And governments have been covering up nuclear meltdowns for 50 years.
BBC reporter Greg Palast reports – based on a first-hand interview of a senior engineer for the corporation which built the Fukushima nuclear plants, and a review of engineers’ field diaries – that the engineers who built the Fukushima nuclear plants knew their design would fail in an earthquake:
The plant was riddled with problems that, no way on earth, could stand an earth- quake. The team of engineers sent in to inspect found that most of these components could “completely and utterly fail” during an earthquake.
That quote is about the Shoreham, New York, power station, not Fukushima. But Palast claims that:
(1) the company fraudulently changed the seismic report to pretend the plant was earthquake-safe;
and
(2) the exact same thing was done at Fukushima.
As I noted in March:
In 2004, Leuren Moret warned in the Japan Times of the exact type of nuclear catastrophe that Japan is now experiencing:
Of all the places in all the world where no one in their right mind would build scores of nuclear power plants, Japan would be pretty near the top of the list.
***
Japan sits on top of four tectonic plates, at the edge of the subduction zone, and is in one of the most tectonically active regions of the world.
***
Many of those reactors have been negligently sited on active faults, particularly in the subduction zone along the Pacific coast, where major earthquakes of magnitude 7-8 or more on the Richter scale occur frequently. The periodicity of major earthquakes in Japan is less than 10 years. There is almost no geologic setting in the world more dangerous for nuclear power than Japan — the third-ranked country in the world for nuclear reactors.
“I think the situation right now is very scary,” says Katsuhiko Ishibashi, a seismologist and professor at Kobe University. “It’s like a kamikaze terrorist wrapped in bombs just waiting to explode.”
***
The Rest…HERE
