The Japanese Earthquake and the Fukushima II Reactor
By ROBERT ALVAREZ
We shouldn't need yet another major nuclear power accident to wake up the public and decision-makers to the fact that there are better, much safer ways to make electricity.
In the aftermath of the largest earthquake to occur in Japan in recorded history, 5,800 residents living within five miles of six reactors at the Fukushima nuclear station have been advised to evacuate and people living within 15 miles of the plant are advised to remain indoors.
Plant operators have not been able to cool down the core of one reactor containing enormous amounts of radioactivity because of failed back-up diesel generators required for the emergency cooling. In a race against time, the power company and the Japanese military are flying in nine emergency generators. Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton announced today that the U.S. Air Force has provided cooling water for the troubled reactor. Complicating matters, Japan's Meteorological Agency has declared the area to be at high risk of being hit by a tsunami.
The plant was operating at full power when the quake hit and even though control rods were automatically inserted to halt the nuclear reaction, the reactor core remains very hot. Even with a fully functioning emergency core cooling system, it would take several hours for the reactor core to cool and stabilize. If emergency cooling isn't restored, the risks of a core melt, and release of radioactivity into the environment is significantly increased. Also, it's not clear if piping and electrically distribution systems inside the plant have been damaged. If so, that would interfere with reactor cooling. A senior U.S. nuclear power technician tells me the window of time before serious problems arise is between 12 and 24 hours.
Early on Japanese nuclear officials provided reassurances that no radiation has been released. However, because of the reactor remains at a very high temperature, radiation levels are rising on the turbine building – forcing to plant operators to vent radioactive steam into the environment.
But the devastating Japanese quake and its outcome could generate a political tsunami here in the United States. For instance, in California it may become impossible for the owners of the San Onofre and Diablo Canyon reactors to extend their operating licenses with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The quake is also likely to further deflate the "nuclear renaissance" balloon.
These two reactors are sitting in high seismic risk zones near earthquake faults. Each is designed to withstand a quake as great as 7.5 on the Richter scale. According to many seismologists, the probability of a major earthquake in the California coastal zone in the foreseeable future is a near certainty. The U.S. Geological Survey reports the largest registering 8.3 on the Richter scale devastated San Francisco in 1906.
"There have been tremblers felt at U.S. plants over the past several
years, but nothing approaching the need for emergency action," Scott Burnell, a spokesman at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission told Reuters today.
As the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe approaches next month, the earthquakes in Japan serve as a reminder that the risks of nuclear power, when things go seriously wrong. The Chernobyl accident required nearly a million emergency responders and cleanup workers. More than 100,000 residents from 187 settlements were permanently evacuated because of radioactive contamination. And area an equal to half of the State of New Jersey was rendered uninhabitable.
Fortunately, U.S. and Japanese reactors have extra measures of protection that were lacking at Chernobl, such as a secondary concrete containment structure over the reactor vessel to prevent escape of radioactivity. In 1979, the containment structure at the Three Mile Island reactor did prevent the escape of a catastrophic amount of radioactivity after the core melted. But, people living nearby were exposed to higher levels of radiation from the accident and deliberate venting to stabilize the reactor. Also, within one hour the multi-billion dollar investment in that plant went down the drain. In the meanwhile, let's hope that the core of the Japanese reactor can be cooled in time. We shouldn't need yet another major nuclear power accident to wake up the public and decision-makers to the fact that there are better, much safer ways to make electricity.
First the Quake, Then the Lies
Don't Worry, It's Just a Little Radiation
By KARL GROSSMAN
And with the major malfunction at the Fukushima nuclear power plant comes the lies…
That’s the way it’s always been when it comes to nuclear technology: deception has always been a central element in the push for it.
As desperate efforts were made Friday to keep coolant flowing—to prevent a nuclear meltdown—“radioactive vapor” was being released from the plant, reported the Associated Press. It quoted Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano as saying the amount of radioactivity was “very small.”
And it “would not affect the environment or human health,” added AP.
Really.
The Nuclear Energy Institute, the U.S. nuclear industry trade group, presented a page on its website devoted to the post-earthquake situation involving nuclear plants in Japan which opened with pronouncement: “The Japanese prime minister and the industry’s safety agency say all plants in the country are safe and that there has been no radiation release from any reactors. Utilities there are managing issues with cooling water systems at the Fukushima plant…”
To sweeten its tale further, the NEI page featured a quote from the chief PR man at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Eliot Brenner: “In fact, all nuclear power plants are built to withstand environmental hazards, including earthquakes. Even those plants that are located outside of areas with extensive seismic activity are designed for safety in the event of such a natural disaster."
Don’t worry.
And CNN Friday posed this question in a dispatch on its website: “Do nuclear plants have failsafe systems?” The answer: “Yes. They are designed with an inter-connected system of fail-safes that ensure there are multiple ways of counteracting a malfunction.”
In fact, like any machinery, nuclear plants can—and regularly do—undergo accidents.
The big difference with atomic energy: the malfunctions can end up killing large numbers of people and impact on other life as well.
If the attempt now going on in Japan to keep the coolant flowing fails, a loss-of-coolant or meltdown accident could occur—a disaster that could have catastrophic impacts on Japan and much of the world.
Radioactive material is used in a nuclear plant as a heat source—to boil water and produce steam that turns a turbine that generates electricity. Huge amounts of radioactive material are made to go through a chain reaction, a process in which atomic particles bombard the nuclei of atoms, causing them to break up and generate heat.
But to keep the nuclear reaction in check—to prevent the material from overheating—vast amounts of coolant are required, up to a million gallons of water a minute in the most common nuclear plants that have been built (“light water” reactors). That is why nuclear plants are sited along rivers and bays, to use the water as coolant.
If the water which cools the reactor “core”—its 200,000 to 300,000 pounds of radioactive fuel load—stops flowing, the “emergency core cooling system” must send water in. If it fails, a loss-of-coolant or meltdown accident can occur.
In such an accident, the core of nuclear fuel, which in less than a minute can reach 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit, burns through the cement bottom of the nuclear plant and bores into the earth. This is what U.S. nuclear scientists have dubbed the “China syndrome”—based on a nuclear plant on their side of the planet undergoing an accident seemingly sending its white-hot core in the direction of China.
In fact, the radioactive core doesn’t—in any location—go to China but it descends to the water table underlying a plant. Then, in a violent reaction, molten core and cold water combine, creating steam explosions and releasing a plume of radioactive poisons.
The problem at Fukushima Diachi nuclear facility is that one of its six reactors lost all its power as a result of the earthquake. Back-up diesel generators didn’t work, so battery power became necessary to keep coolant water flowing. If the battery power is depleted and electric power is not otherwise restored, a loss-of-coolant accident or meltdown would ensue.
“The emergency shutdown has been conducted but the process of cooling down the reaction is currently not going as planned,” explained Chief Cabinet Secretary Edano.Friday.
Thus Japan declared a state of “atomic power emergency” and people living within three kilometers of the Fukushima facility were advised to evacuate.
But if the coolant flow is not maintained and a loss-of-coolant accident with a “breach of containment” occurs, people way beyond three kilometers around Fukushima would be impacted. The radioactive releases in the Chernobyl nuclear plant accident affected the entire northern hemisphere, as a book published last year by the New York Academy of Sciences documents. And Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment, authored by Dr. Alexey Yablokov, Dr. Vassily Nesterenko and Dr. Alexey Nesterenko, finds that medical records between 1986, the year of the accident, and 2004 reflect 985,000 deaths as a result of the radioactivity released. Most of the deaths were in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, but others were spread through the many other countries the radiation from Chernobyl struck.
Where the radioactivity spreads after a nuclear plant meltdown is largely a function of where winds take the radioactivity and of the rain that causes it to fall out.
Perhaps the biggest lie ever regarding nuclear power has been the claim by the International Atomic Energy Agency—created to boost and somehow at the same time regulate nuclear power—that perhaps 4,000 people will die as a result of Chernobyl.
Where the radioactivity spreads after a nuclear plant meltdown is largely a function of where winds take the radioactivity and of the rain that causes it to fall out.
The Japanese nuclear crisis comes amid a global drive to “revive” nuclear power. After the Chernobyl disaster, good sense—and the survival instinct—caused people all over the world to say no to new nuclear power plants.
A leader in this is U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu, a nuclear scientist. He came to his DOE post after being director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, part of the U.S. government’s chain of national nuclear laboratories. Some got their start during the Manhattan Project of World War II creating atomic weaponry. All have since pushed commercial nuclear power, too.
In a speech last month to President Obama’s “Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nature Future,” Chu declared: “The Obama administration believes that nuclear energy has an important role to play as America moves to a clean energy future.” He declared that nuclear power is “carbon free energy"—disregarding the reality that the “nuclear cycle,” from mining and milling to fuel enrichment and so on, contributes to global warming. And he spoke, in his February 12th address, of “upgrades to our existing reactor fleet” and a move to “speed the development of next generation reactors.”
Japan’s jump into nuclear power is especially ironic considering it was on the receiving end of the bombs built by the Manhattan Project. Furthermore, it is situated on a string of volcanic islands vulnerable to earthquakes. Of course, Japan is not alone on this score: in the U.S., the Diablo Canyon nuclear facility in California was built less than three miles from the Hosgri earthquake fault.
Nuclear power plants are, in fact, life-threatening wherever they are—they represent the most dangerous way to boil water ever devised.
Wind, solar and geothermal energy and other forms of safe, clean power would not cause massive deadly damage because of an earthquake.
But don’t tell that to the atomic Pinocchios pushing nuclear technology.
Nukes on a Faultline
Japan's Quake Could Have Irradiated the Entire United States
By HARVEY WASSERMAN
Had the violent 8.9 Richter-scale earthquake that has just savaged Japan hit off the California coast, it could have ripped apart at least four coastal reactors and sent a lethal cloud of radiation across the entire United States.
The two huge reactors each at San Onofre and Diablo Canyon are not designed to withstand such powerful shocks. All four are extremely close to major faults.
All four reactors are located relatively low to the coast. They are vulnerable to tsunamis like those now expected to hit as many as fifty countries.
San Onofre sits between San Diego and Los Angeles. A radioactive cloud spewing from one or both reactors there would do incalculable damage to either or both urban areas before carrying over the rest of southern and central California.
Diablo Canyon is at Avila Beach, on the coast just west of San Luis Obispo,wasser between Los Angeles and San Francisco. A radioactive eruption there would pour into central California and, depending on the winds, up to the Bay Area or southeast into Santa Barbara and then to Los Angeles. The cloud would at very least permanently destroy much of the region on which most Americans rely for their winter supply of fresh vegetables.
By the federal Price-Anderson Act of 1957, the owners of the destroyed reactors---including Pacific Gas & Electric and Southern California Edison---would be covered by private insurance only up to $11 billion, a tiny fraction of the trillions of dollars worth of damage that would be done. The rest would become the responsibility of the federal taxpayer and the fallout victims. Virtually all homeowner insurance policies in the United States exempt the insurers from liability from a reactor disaster.
The most definitive recent study of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster puts the death toll at 985,000. The accident irradiated a remote rural area. The nearest city, Kiev, is 80 kilometers away.
But San Luis Obispo is some ten miles directly downwind from Diablo Canyon. The region around San Onofre has become heavily suburbanized.
Heavy radioactive fallout spread from Chernobyl blanketed all of Europe within a matter of days. It covered an area far larger than the United States.
Fallout did hit the jet stream and then the coast of California, thousands of miles away, within ten days. It then carried all the way across the northern tier of the United States.
Chernobyl Unit Four was of comparable size to the two reactors at Diablo Canyon, and somewhat larger than the two at San Onofre.
But it was very new when it exploded. California's four coastal reactors have been operating since the 1970s and 1980s. Their accumulated internal radioactive burdens could exceed what was spewed at Chernobyl.
Japanese officials say all affected reactors automatically shut, with no radiation releases. But they are not reliable. In 2007 a smaller earthquake rocked the seven-reactor Kashiwazaki site and forced its lengthy shut-down.
Preliminary reports indicate at least one fire at a Japanese reactor hit by this quake and tsunami.
In 1986 the Perry nuclear plant, east of Cleveland, was rocked by a 5.5 Richter-scale shock, many orders of magnitude weaker than this one. That quake broke pipes and other key equipment within the plant. It took out nearby roads and bridges.
Thankfully, Perry had not yet opened. An official Ohio commission later warned that evacuation during such a quake would be impossible.
Numerous other American reactors sit on or near earthquake faults.
The Obama Administration is now asking Congress for $36 billion in new loan guarantees to build more commercial reactors.
It has yet to reveal its exact plans for dealing with a major reactor disaster. Nor has it identified the cash or human reserves needed to cover the death and destruction imposed by the reactors' owners.
By ROBERT ALVAREZ
We shouldn't need yet another major nuclear power accident to wake up the public and decision-makers to the fact that there are better, much safer ways to make electricity.
In the aftermath of the largest earthquake to occur in Japan in recorded history, 5,800 residents living within five miles of six reactors at the Fukushima nuclear station have been advised to evacuate and people living within 15 miles of the plant are advised to remain indoors.
Plant operators have not been able to cool down the core of one reactor containing enormous amounts of radioactivity because of failed back-up diesel generators required for the emergency cooling. In a race against time, the power company and the Japanese military are flying in nine emergency generators. Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton announced today that the U.S. Air Force has provided cooling water for the troubled reactor. Complicating matters, Japan's Meteorological Agency has declared the area to be at high risk of being hit by a tsunami.
The plant was operating at full power when the quake hit and even though control rods were automatically inserted to halt the nuclear reaction, the reactor core remains very hot. Even with a fully functioning emergency core cooling system, it would take several hours for the reactor core to cool and stabilize. If emergency cooling isn't restored, the risks of a core melt, and release of radioactivity into the environment is significantly increased. Also, it's not clear if piping and electrically distribution systems inside the plant have been damaged. If so, that would interfere with reactor cooling. A senior U.S. nuclear power technician tells me the window of time before serious problems arise is between 12 and 24 hours.
Early on Japanese nuclear officials provided reassurances that no radiation has been released. However, because of the reactor remains at a very high temperature, radiation levels are rising on the turbine building – forcing to plant operators to vent radioactive steam into the environment.
But the devastating Japanese quake and its outcome could generate a political tsunami here in the United States. For instance, in California it may become impossible for the owners of the San Onofre and Diablo Canyon reactors to extend their operating licenses with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The quake is also likely to further deflate the "nuclear renaissance" balloon.
These two reactors are sitting in high seismic risk zones near earthquake faults. Each is designed to withstand a quake as great as 7.5 on the Richter scale. According to many seismologists, the probability of a major earthquake in the California coastal zone in the foreseeable future is a near certainty. The U.S. Geological Survey reports the largest registering 8.3 on the Richter scale devastated San Francisco in 1906.
"There have been tremblers felt at U.S. plants over the past several
years, but nothing approaching the need for emergency action," Scott Burnell, a spokesman at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission told Reuters today.
As the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe approaches next month, the earthquakes in Japan serve as a reminder that the risks of nuclear power, when things go seriously wrong. The Chernobyl accident required nearly a million emergency responders and cleanup workers. More than 100,000 residents from 187 settlements were permanently evacuated because of radioactive contamination. And area an equal to half of the State of New Jersey was rendered uninhabitable.
Fortunately, U.S. and Japanese reactors have extra measures of protection that were lacking at Chernobl, such as a secondary concrete containment structure over the reactor vessel to prevent escape of radioactivity. In 1979, the containment structure at the Three Mile Island reactor did prevent the escape of a catastrophic amount of radioactivity after the core melted. But, people living nearby were exposed to higher levels of radiation from the accident and deliberate venting to stabilize the reactor. Also, within one hour the multi-billion dollar investment in that plant went down the drain. In the meanwhile, let's hope that the core of the Japanese reactor can be cooled in time. We shouldn't need yet another major nuclear power accident to wake up the public and decision-makers to the fact that there are better, much safer ways to make electricity.
+++++++++
First the Quake, Then the Lies
Don't Worry, It's Just a Little Radiation
By KARL GROSSMAN
And with the major malfunction at the Fukushima nuclear power plant comes the lies…
That’s the way it’s always been when it comes to nuclear technology: deception has always been a central element in the push for it.
As desperate efforts were made Friday to keep coolant flowing—to prevent a nuclear meltdown—“radioactive vapor” was being released from the plant, reported the Associated Press. It quoted Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano as saying the amount of radioactivity was “very small.”
And it “would not affect the environment or human health,” added AP.
Really.
The Nuclear Energy Institute, the U.S. nuclear industry trade group, presented a page on its website devoted to the post-earthquake situation involving nuclear plants in Japan which opened with pronouncement: “The Japanese prime minister and the industry’s safety agency say all plants in the country are safe and that there has been no radiation release from any reactors. Utilities there are managing issues with cooling water systems at the Fukushima plant…”
To sweeten its tale further, the NEI page featured a quote from the chief PR man at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Eliot Brenner: “In fact, all nuclear power plants are built to withstand environmental hazards, including earthquakes. Even those plants that are located outside of areas with extensive seismic activity are designed for safety in the event of such a natural disaster."
Don’t worry.
And CNN Friday posed this question in a dispatch on its website: “Do nuclear plants have failsafe systems?” The answer: “Yes. They are designed with an inter-connected system of fail-safes that ensure there are multiple ways of counteracting a malfunction.”
In fact, like any machinery, nuclear plants can—and regularly do—undergo accidents.
The big difference with atomic energy: the malfunctions can end up killing large numbers of people and impact on other life as well.
If the attempt now going on in Japan to keep the coolant flowing fails, a loss-of-coolant or meltdown accident could occur—a disaster that could have catastrophic impacts on Japan and much of the world.
Radioactive material is used in a nuclear plant as a heat source—to boil water and produce steam that turns a turbine that generates electricity. Huge amounts of radioactive material are made to go through a chain reaction, a process in which atomic particles bombard the nuclei of atoms, causing them to break up and generate heat.
But to keep the nuclear reaction in check—to prevent the material from overheating—vast amounts of coolant are required, up to a million gallons of water a minute in the most common nuclear plants that have been built (“light water” reactors). That is why nuclear plants are sited along rivers and bays, to use the water as coolant.
If the water which cools the reactor “core”—its 200,000 to 300,000 pounds of radioactive fuel load—stops flowing, the “emergency core cooling system” must send water in. If it fails, a loss-of-coolant or meltdown accident can occur.
In such an accident, the core of nuclear fuel, which in less than a minute can reach 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit, burns through the cement bottom of the nuclear plant and bores into the earth. This is what U.S. nuclear scientists have dubbed the “China syndrome”—based on a nuclear plant on their side of the planet undergoing an accident seemingly sending its white-hot core in the direction of China.
In fact, the radioactive core doesn’t—in any location—go to China but it descends to the water table underlying a plant. Then, in a violent reaction, molten core and cold water combine, creating steam explosions and releasing a plume of radioactive poisons.
The problem at Fukushima Diachi nuclear facility is that one of its six reactors lost all its power as a result of the earthquake. Back-up diesel generators didn’t work, so battery power became necessary to keep coolant water flowing. If the battery power is depleted and electric power is not otherwise restored, a loss-of-coolant accident or meltdown would ensue.
“The emergency shutdown has been conducted but the process of cooling down the reaction is currently not going as planned,” explained Chief Cabinet Secretary Edano.Friday.
Thus Japan declared a state of “atomic power emergency” and people living within three kilometers of the Fukushima facility were advised to evacuate.
But if the coolant flow is not maintained and a loss-of-coolant accident with a “breach of containment” occurs, people way beyond three kilometers around Fukushima would be impacted. The radioactive releases in the Chernobyl nuclear plant accident affected the entire northern hemisphere, as a book published last year by the New York Academy of Sciences documents. And Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment, authored by Dr. Alexey Yablokov, Dr. Vassily Nesterenko and Dr. Alexey Nesterenko, finds that medical records between 1986, the year of the accident, and 2004 reflect 985,000 deaths as a result of the radioactivity released. Most of the deaths were in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, but others were spread through the many other countries the radiation from Chernobyl struck.
Where the radioactivity spreads after a nuclear plant meltdown is largely a function of where winds take the radioactivity and of the rain that causes it to fall out.
Perhaps the biggest lie ever regarding nuclear power has been the claim by the International Atomic Energy Agency—created to boost and somehow at the same time regulate nuclear power—that perhaps 4,000 people will die as a result of Chernobyl.
Where the radioactivity spreads after a nuclear plant meltdown is largely a function of where winds take the radioactivity and of the rain that causes it to fall out.
The Japanese nuclear crisis comes amid a global drive to “revive” nuclear power. After the Chernobyl disaster, good sense—and the survival instinct—caused people all over the world to say no to new nuclear power plants.
A leader in this is U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu, a nuclear scientist. He came to his DOE post after being director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, part of the U.S. government’s chain of national nuclear laboratories. Some got their start during the Manhattan Project of World War II creating atomic weaponry. All have since pushed commercial nuclear power, too.
In a speech last month to President Obama’s “Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nature Future,” Chu declared: “The Obama administration believes that nuclear energy has an important role to play as America moves to a clean energy future.” He declared that nuclear power is “carbon free energy"—disregarding the reality that the “nuclear cycle,” from mining and milling to fuel enrichment and so on, contributes to global warming. And he spoke, in his February 12th address, of “upgrades to our existing reactor fleet” and a move to “speed the development of next generation reactors.”
Japan’s jump into nuclear power is especially ironic considering it was on the receiving end of the bombs built by the Manhattan Project. Furthermore, it is situated on a string of volcanic islands vulnerable to earthquakes. Of course, Japan is not alone on this score: in the U.S., the Diablo Canyon nuclear facility in California was built less than three miles from the Hosgri earthquake fault.
Nuclear power plants are, in fact, life-threatening wherever they are—they represent the most dangerous way to boil water ever devised.
Wind, solar and geothermal energy and other forms of safe, clean power would not cause massive deadly damage because of an earthquake.
But don’t tell that to the atomic Pinocchios pushing nuclear technology.
+++++++++++++
Nukes on a Faultline
Japan's Quake Could Have Irradiated the Entire United States
By HARVEY WASSERMAN
Had the violent 8.9 Richter-scale earthquake that has just savaged Japan hit off the California coast, it could have ripped apart at least four coastal reactors and sent a lethal cloud of radiation across the entire United States.
The two huge reactors each at San Onofre and Diablo Canyon are not designed to withstand such powerful shocks. All four are extremely close to major faults.
All four reactors are located relatively low to the coast. They are vulnerable to tsunamis like those now expected to hit as many as fifty countries.
San Onofre sits between San Diego and Los Angeles. A radioactive cloud spewing from one or both reactors there would do incalculable damage to either or both urban areas before carrying over the rest of southern and central California.
Diablo Canyon is at Avila Beach, on the coast just west of San Luis Obispo,wasser between Los Angeles and San Francisco. A radioactive eruption there would pour into central California and, depending on the winds, up to the Bay Area or southeast into Santa Barbara and then to Los Angeles. The cloud would at very least permanently destroy much of the region on which most Americans rely for their winter supply of fresh vegetables.
By the federal Price-Anderson Act of 1957, the owners of the destroyed reactors---including Pacific Gas & Electric and Southern California Edison---would be covered by private insurance only up to $11 billion, a tiny fraction of the trillions of dollars worth of damage that would be done. The rest would become the responsibility of the federal taxpayer and the fallout victims. Virtually all homeowner insurance policies in the United States exempt the insurers from liability from a reactor disaster.
The most definitive recent study of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster puts the death toll at 985,000. The accident irradiated a remote rural area. The nearest city, Kiev, is 80 kilometers away.
But San Luis Obispo is some ten miles directly downwind from Diablo Canyon. The region around San Onofre has become heavily suburbanized.
Heavy radioactive fallout spread from Chernobyl blanketed all of Europe within a matter of days. It covered an area far larger than the United States.
Fallout did hit the jet stream and then the coast of California, thousands of miles away, within ten days. It then carried all the way across the northern tier of the United States.
Chernobyl Unit Four was of comparable size to the two reactors at Diablo Canyon, and somewhat larger than the two at San Onofre.
But it was very new when it exploded. California's four coastal reactors have been operating since the 1970s and 1980s. Their accumulated internal radioactive burdens could exceed what was spewed at Chernobyl.
Japanese officials say all affected reactors automatically shut, with no radiation releases. But they are not reliable. In 2007 a smaller earthquake rocked the seven-reactor Kashiwazaki site and forced its lengthy shut-down.
Preliminary reports indicate at least one fire at a Japanese reactor hit by this quake and tsunami.
In 1986 the Perry nuclear plant, east of Cleveland, was rocked by a 5.5 Richter-scale shock, many orders of magnitude weaker than this one. That quake broke pipes and other key equipment within the plant. It took out nearby roads and bridges.
Thankfully, Perry had not yet opened. An official Ohio commission later warned that evacuation during such a quake would be impossible.
Numerous other American reactors sit on or near earthquake faults.
The Obama Administration is now asking Congress for $36 billion in new loan guarantees to build more commercial reactors.
It has yet to reveal its exact plans for dealing with a major reactor disaster. Nor has it identified the cash or human reserves needed to cover the death and destruction imposed by the reactors' owners.
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