Japan says earthquake shook nuclear plant past safety limits

7 comments

1. [deleted]

2. I hope y’all are commenting after actually reading the article.

   >The authority said that the buildings at the Shika nuclear power plant on the Noto Peninsula were made to sustain shaking measured at 918 Galileo units, but the Jan. 1 earthquake produced 957 Galileo units of shaking.

   >The authority and Hokuriku Electric Power Co., which run the plants, however, said both units of the plant were already offline before the earthquake and no significant damage was reported to the facility.

3. From an engineering perspective, this absolutely not a big deal.

4. Before people comment, please read this. The title is kinda misleading.

5. I get that there is additional resilience in the system, but don’t feel that this is something that should just be easily dismissed.

   The bottom line is that the event exceeded the expected safety limit.
   Seemingly not by much, but I have no idea whether 957 versus 918 is much, or not. Is the expected failure point 1,000? 2,000? 5,000? … are these numbers even possible??

   The earthquake itself was about 15 times less powerful than the Tohoku one, so it would seem reasonable to have expected that this shouldn’t have come anywhere close to the formal safety limit.

   I am pro-nuclear but they need to be managed properly and to the highest degree of safety possible. If spending billions of yen more to upgrade the sites is necessary, it is money very well spent… certainly cheaper than the trillions it costs to cleanup a disaster.

6. I remember checking on the status of the plants immediately after the quake and they said they had been unaffected and the nearest one was even shut down at the time for maintenance.

   People need to stop only reading the title of a post before accepting something as fact.

7. What an irresponsible headline. Or, more likely, intentionally misleading. This is a success story. Nuclear plant shaken past limits, is totally fine.