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.

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).

It was a combination of shortsightedness, in not putting the power generators on higher ground well away from any potential tsunami, the Tsunami wall being a little too short and the land falling by more than a meter as a direct consequence of the earthquake.

You have to remember that they threw out the Richter Scale a couple of years ago and the new scale goes higher and more quickly.

A "5" is probably a only a 2 or so on the old Richter Scale. I think hearing about a "2" wasn't exciting enough on the news, when they could call it an 8 or 10, it sounds much more dramatic...

Depends what you call big? We had one (I think late 2007 or early 2008) that woke my wife up with the house shaking. (It woke my parents up too, who were fifty miles away).
It didn't wake me up, so my wife woke me up panicing. I was still half asleep and my mind went "Oh a big wave just hit the rig" and I went straight back to sleep.

I have slept through four earthquakes, but they were tiny ones, rattled the odd windchime, and little damage, plus all below 3 on the Richter scale.

It was February 2008, epicentre Market Rasen, 5.2 and about 45 miles from where I live. It woke me and how !!!

Initially I thought there had been a partial collapse of part of my house. A swift visit to each inside room proved this wasn't the case. I went back to bed. 5 minutes later I was up in my dressing gown, outside with a torch, convinced that it must have been the chimney stack that had fallen. Again no sign of damage.

It was scary and I don't want to live through that again. God only knows what a really big one must be like.

The boom and bed shaking it typical of what wakes you up on a semi-sub oil rig if a massive wave hits. It's quite common in winter storms, which it why my mind thought that's what it was.