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| mikepgood wrote: i got the earthquake alert app from the android market. Two things have sprung to mind. 1. has anyone been in a big one? 2. there are magnitude 5 eartquakes on an almost daily basis off Japan's east coast. What in the world were they building nuclear power plants there for without backups on the backups for the backup water pumps? And doing stupid things like storing waste in the reactor house. | |
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1 - No
2 - Trying to address their need for electricity in a country with very few natural resources (of the power generating variety). The Japanese are very good at earthquake proofing structures, including nuclear power plants. It wasn't the force of the ground shaking that did for Fukishima, it was the massive tidal wave that was far larger than they ever figured they'd encounter when the plant was built in the 60's (IIRC).
It's fairly common for nuclear power stations to store spent fuel on site. For one thing, it's too dangerous to do anything else when it's fresh out of the reactor - it needs to cool down (both in terms of temperature and activity) in a deep water pool (containing Boric Acid for preference) for a certain amount of time before it's practical to move it. Secondly, people don't like that stuff being moved. Anti-nuclear/environmental campaigners (from memory) were very successful in stopping shipments of spent fuel from Japan to Sellafield (the UK was one of the small number of countries that would actually do reprocessing).