The Risk Of Nuclear Reactors On Fault Lines

With Fukushima American Style Only One Big Quake Away, Experts Warn

By Stefan Stanford

The July 11th story over at Common Dreams republished at Zero Hedge two days later is enough to give any prepper pause. Titled "The Quake To Make Los Angeles A Radioactive Dead Zone", their story reported that had the previous Friday’s 7.1 earthquake and other ongoing seismic shocks hit less than 200 miles northwest of Ridgecrest/China Lake, ten million people in Los Angeles would now be under an apocalyptic cloud, their lives and those of the state and nation in radioactive ruin. (ANP: Map at the top of this story showing all of the nuclear power plants in California close to the San Andreas Fault is courtesy of Nuclear.News.)

Warning within their story that due to two cracked, embrittled, under-maintained, unregulated, uninsured, an un-inspected atomic reactors at the nuclear power plant at Diablo Canyon, an earthquake in that region could bring about a likely human death toll in the millions and property losses in the trillions, their story also reported this.:

The forever damage to our species’ food supply, ecological support systems, and longterm economy would be very far beyond any meaningful calculation. The threat to the ability of the human race to survive on this planet would be extremely significant. 

And while so far Diablo Canyon and the rest of the nuclear power plants near the San Andreas fault line have dodged a bullet, as Common Dreams reports, at least a dozen faults have been identified within a small radius around the reactors. The reactor cores are less than fifty miles from the San Andreas fault, less than half the distance that Fukushima Daiichi was from the epicenter that destroyed four reactors there. From their story they explain what might happen should a large quake hit that region with a warning that the company maintaining them is totally unprepared and bankrupt.: 

Their cores would be melting into the ground. Hydrogen explosions would be blasting the site to deadly dust. One or both melted cores would have burned into the earth and hit ground or ocean water, causing massive steam explosions with physical impacts in the range of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The huge clouds would send murderous radioactive isotopes into the atmosphere that would permanently poison the land, the oceans, the air… and circle the globe again and again, and yet again, filling the lungs of billions of living things with the most potent poisons humans have ever created.

In 2010, badly maintained gas pipes run by Pacific Gas & Electric blew up a neighborhood in San Bruno, killing eight people. PG&E’s badly maintained power lines have helped torch much of northern California, killing 80 people and incinerating more than 10,000 structures.

Now in bankruptcy, with its third president in two years, PG&E is utterly unqualified to run two large, old, obsolete, crumbling atomic reactors which are surrounded by earthquake faults. 

Diablo cannot withstand an earthquake of the magnitude now hitting less than 200 miles away. In 2014, the Associated Press reported that Dr. Michael Peck, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s site inspector at Diablo, had warned that the two reactors should be shut because they can’t withstand a seismic shock like the one that has just hit so close.

The NRC tried to bury Peck’s report. They attacked his findings, then shipped him to Tennessee. He’s no longer with the Commission. 

Decades before disaster struck at Fukushima Daiichi, millions of Japanese citizens marched to demand atomic reactors NOT be built in a zone riddled by fault lines, washed by tsunamis. In California, ten thousand citizens were arrested demanding the same. Diablo’s owners hid the existence of the Hosgri Fault just three miles from the site.

A dozen more nearby fault lines have since been found, capable in tandem of delivering shocks like the ones shaking Ridgecrest. No significant structural improvements have been made to deal with the newfound fault lines.