Just a brief word about the earthquake yesterday. I'm very familiar with Mineral, VA area where the epicenter of the quake was. And, yes, there's a massive nuclear power plant there, so one of my first calls was to a contact in that area.
Following Fukushima, the North Anna power plant people called a meeting to reassure the citizenry that nothing like that would ever happen there -- after all, there hadn't been an earthquake in decades. How could anything possibly happen? Earthquakes? That's rich.
It turns out, they built the power plant directly above a fault line, and the earthquake that could never ever happen, well, there it was.
They were able to shut down the power plant in time, and run the facility using a diesel fuel generator. But what if that generator had failed? Or what if the earthquake had been larger? Or both?
Maybe while we're planning to build dozens more of these things, we should think about perhaps not positioning them above effing fault lines. I think that would be a swell idear. Smart.
Adding... Rawstory reports:
A nuclear power plant that was shut down after an earthquake struck central Virginia Tuesday had seismographs removed in 1990s due to budget cuts.
And...
U.S. nuclear officials said that the North Anna Power Station, which has two nuclear reactors, had lost offsite power and was using diesel generators to maintain cooling operations after an 5.9 earthquake hit the region.
The North Anna plant, which was near the epicenter of Tuesday's quake, is reportedly located on a fault line.
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission rates the plant as the seventh most likely to receive core damage from a quake. But they say the chances of that are only 1 in 22,727.
Again, any regulations the Obama administration enacts for its fleet of new reactors will be rolled back by regulation-hating Republicans.